operation of this system, in less than five years from this time this wheel of fortune, or rather misfortune, will go round again; you will be at the bottom and the farmers at the top, and you will have wheat again at 70s. or 80s. a quarter, causing thus a pretended prosperity among the farmers. As sure as you have had this revolution before, so sure will you have it again. There is nothing in Sir Robert Peel's Corn Law to prevent the recurrence of similar disasters. The law is as complete a bar to legitimate trade as the old law was. I speak in the presence of merchants shipping to every quarter of the globe, men who bring back the produce of every quarter of the globe, and I put it to them whether, with this sliding scale, they daro to order from a foreign country a single cargo of wheat in exchange for the manufactures which they sell? This being the case—and it is the whole case—you are not stimulating other countries to provide for your future wants, you are laying up no store here or stores abroad, and there will again be a recurrence of the disasters we have passed through."
Mr. Bright then addressed the meeting in a spiritstirring speech. He warned the country against the belief that the then comparative prosperity was likely to be permanent:—
"The Providence which has given us two or three good harvests may give us one, or two, or three more; but we must bear in mind that the course of the seasons cannot be changed, will not be changed, to suit the caprice, the folly, or the criminality of human legislation. (Applause.) As we have had before, so we shall have again a change of seasons; and when that change shall come, and if the people of this country have not, in the meantime, bestirred themselves and shaken off this iniquitous impost, I ask you whom will you blame but yourselves, and where can you run for refuge? for your own folly will have led you into danger, and by your own neglect alone will you have allowed these evils again to come upon you. You will again have to suffer those evils which arise from the price of bread rising all over the country. The consumption by the great mass of the people of all kinds of manufactured goods will be greatly crippled; you will have again a great exportation of gold, and a great derangement of the monetary affairs of the country; you will again have numbers of merchants and manufacturers going rapidly, week after week, into the Gazette; you will again have your shopkeepers impoverished; and, worst of all, you will again have the labourers of this district, our honest and industrious artizans plunged into all that distress which we have lately witnessed; and arising from that distress, discontent,
