Cobden and Bright; and then they, one and all, and at once, proceeded to hear those gentlemen's speeches, and voted in favour of the free trade resolution.
And, for a moment, supposing that those defeats arose from no other cause than the facility of mustering a town's population, what would that fact have declared? Why, that, contrary to the reiterated claim of the landowners, to have the inhabitants of towns so situated included as a part of the agricultural population, being solely employed in supplying the wants of the agriculturists, they had renounced the allegiance and denied the alliance. When the object was to represent the great importance of the agricultural interest, every tradesman not absolutely a manufacturer of iron, or wool, or cotton, or silk, was claimed as a part of that interest. Towns where those anti-corn-law meetings had been held—Norwich, Colches. ter, Chelmsford, Taunton, Aylesford, Hertford, Hunting. don, Alnwick, Kelso, Salisbury, Canterbury, Knutsford— were always claimed by the landowners as a part and parcel of their own interest. The mantle of protection was claimed for them as being indissolubly connected with the owners and cultivators of the soil, their neighbours and their sole employers. But when a meeting was held, and when those tradesmen voted according to their conscience.—Then, seeing that they derived no benefit from landlord legislation, they voted for free trade—they were spoken of as a factious "town-population," more easily gathered together and more easily led to mischief than their agricultural friends and customers. " They are all ours," said the landlords, when they wished to swell out the numbers of the agricultural population. "They are none of ours," was the cry when they voted against landlord legislation.
But where were the members of the high aristocracy of the counties in which those contests so singularly inglorious to the monopolists had taken place. Where were
