recent commercial distresses. He looked upon the Canadian Corn Bill as a useful subsidiary measure to the act of 1842. The great defect of the sliding scale was its tendency to encourage speculation, with a view to raise prices immediately before the harvest was reaped. This the Canadian Corn Act kept in check, as the opening of the St. Lawrence in the spring enabled cargoes to arrive here during summer. Ridiculing the idea of the importation of foreign cattle causing the fall in prices, looking to the small number brought over, he told the agriculturists that there was another thing which they ought to fear much more—low wages in the manufacturing districts, thereby contracting the ability to consume agricultural produce. As to Mr. Miles's proposition, never had there been so small a demand made by so great an interest. In 1813, with a population of 10,500,000, the poor and county rates were £8,600,000; in 1845, with a population of 16,500,000, they amounted to £6,800,000, or, in other words, while the population had increased one-third, the rates had diminished one-third; at the former being a charge of 16s. 3d. on each head of the population, at the latter, of only 8s. 4d. Arguing generally against the proposition for shifting the the burden of the county-rates, which was not now in that house, he sat down by intimating the determination of the government to oppose the motion.
"After Mr. Newdegate had made a complaining speech,
"Lord John Russell (in a speech which was spoken with great spirit, and in the progress of which he paid a marked compliment to the ability of Mr. Cobden) addressed the house with vigour and effect on the free-trade part of the question. He remarked that the proceedings of that night were an additional evidence that 'protection was the bane of agriculture.' Mr. Miles, instead of proposing the repeal of the tariff and the Canadian Corn Bill, asked for a pitiful boon of some two or three hundred thousand pounds on the county-rates; and the 'consolatory speech of Sir James Graham was neither more nor less than a declaration that protection must be gradually abandoned. Restriction and monopoly was every way unfavourable to that energy which competition inspires. Holland once protected spices and silks these were luxuries; but corn was a necessary which could not be unnaturally enhanced without injury to the community. When in power, he had proposed a moderate fixed duty; but those then in opposition declared that they would not throw the Corn Law into the 'lottery of legislation.' Coming into power, they had commenced breaking down that protection which they had been placed in office to maintain, and which, so long as it continued to exist, gave the farmer a false reliance and checked his use of capital, science, and skill. He had been accused by Sir Robert Peel of 'oscillating' between protection and free trade. He preferred a