Page:History of the Anti corn law league.pdf/58

comparatively unnoticed, and to posterity comparatively unknown. How briefly are periods of peace passed over in our oldest and most authentic record! After the deliverance of Israel from a foreign yoke, effected under the direction of Deborah, the prophetess, we read: "And the land had rest forty years;" and that Jair "judged Israel twenty-and-two years." We hear no more of them; they judged rightly: the people were at rest—no history of misdoings was needed. The history of the eighty-five years of tranquillity, of peace, and, as we may presume, of plenty, is told in three lines. Would that the history of mankind were capable of such brief but precious record! In our little narrow history-ground of Manchester, we find, now and then, some such refreshing resting-places, some such green in the thirsty waste. In thirty years of war and scarcity, hunger and nakedness, to three-fourths of the community, are three or four years of peace and plenty nothing to the afflicted millions? In so long a period of constantly deepening gloom, was a brief gleam of general sunshine nothing? History was silent, but the people were fed. And they thought also, those briefly well-fed multitudes, calmly, but not less deeply, and their inquiry was: "Why should it not always be thus?" Mr. Wheeler, in his " History of Manchester," makes a great leap from Hunt's trial at York, in 1820, to the bank failures at the end of 1825, and the loom breakings and factory burnings of 1826. There lay a happy period some time between. One could then draw the curtains, and wheel round the sofa nearer to the cheerful fire, and the more enjoy the social meal, from the conviction that there was comfort also in the cottage, and no wailings in the street. It was worth something on the Saturday night, to see the working man's wife need her husband's help to carry home the heavy basket, filled with bread and beef, and flour and suet. But then came the reflection that the Corn Law was unrepealed, and that a single bad harvest might mar all this