COBDEN'S SPEECH.
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camp, and struck terror into them even behind their entrenchments. He said that—
"Throughout five nights of debate, hardly anybody had touched upon the main question, which was, whether you had a right to keep up a law, having for its object to inflict scarcity on the people. For whose interest? Not that of the farmer—not that of the agricultural labourer—but that of the landlord. When prices were at the highest, the condition of the farm labourer was at the worst. If such a law was ever to benefit the farm labourer, it should have benefited him in 1840, when there had been three successive years of high prices. Since 1840, the matter wag still worse, and the increase of petty crime so great, that it was found necessary to wink at it instead of punishing it. Then as to the farmer, what benefit had he ever derived from the Corn Laws? From 1815 to 1841 there had been a series of these laws, but they had not shut out repeated seasons of agricultural distress. You might send a copy of such laws to another planet, if you could find a conveyance; and the inhabitants of that planet would at once remark, 'These enactments must have been made by landowners.' He would not say that the landlords were not perfectly entitled to get the best rents they could; but he would say they were not entitled to come to parliament for the purpose of artificially raising those rents. The rents of England had at least doubled in the last fifty years. Into that increase it was now the business of the legislature to enquire. A 'farmer's friend' cry had been raised to bring in the present ministers, there they were now, on the Treasury bench; they had obtained the power and patronage of the government, but what had the farmers got? It was his cue to show the farmers how they had been cajoled. They had been driven up to the poll by their landlords, and in many counties farming was kept at the worst, because landlords refused to grant leases, order to retain their tenants under their political influence. This must not be treated as a farmer's question any longer, and the farmer knew it now. Sir Robert Peel had stated that the effect of this new Corn Law would be to lower prices; but nothing was said by the landlords about lowering the rents. The farmers were tired of their old friends; they had now shaken hands with the manufacturers; but in order that the farmers might understand the manufacturers to have to designs for themselves, he wished to explain that he bought to improve, not to impair, her Majesty's revenue; indeed the whole amount of the protecting duties to the manufactures was under two millions sterling. At present the public mind was arrayed solely against that key-stone in the arch of monopoly, the monopoly of agriculture; but it should not disperse until it had destroyed monopoly of every other kind. There were men in that house ever stirring in
