perhaps like to be a little better lodged there also.
158. The way to get more clothes is—not, necessarily, to get more cotton. There were words written twenty years ago[1] which would have saved many of us some shivering, had they been minded in time. Shall we read them again?
"The Continental people, it would seem, are importing our machinery, beginning to spin cotton, and manufacture for themselves; to cut us out of this market, and then out of that! Sad news, indeed; but irremediable. By no means the saddest news—the saddest news, is that we should find our national existence, as I sometimes hear it said, depend on selling manufactured cotton at a farthing an ell cheaper than any other people. A most narrow stand for a great nation to base itself on! A stand which, with all the Corn-Law abrogations conceivable, I do not think will be capable of enduring.
- ↑ [(Past and Present, Chap. IX. of Third Section.) To think that for these twenty—now twenty-six—years, this one voice of Carlyle's has been the only faithful and useful utterance in all England, and has sounded through all these years in vain! See Fors Clavigera, Letter X.]
