of the country to an enormous extent, and vastly increased her material wealth and the prosperity of her inhabitants. The "birthright" of Englishmen would have been barren indeed but for that "mess of pottage" which private owners have given during a long series of years in the shape of their capital applied to the cultivation of the soil, and which represents that expansion of the power and wealth of Great Britain against which Mr Chamberlain is in fact protesting when he desires to return to that old, undeveloped, primitive condition of things which, if advocated by an old-fashioned Tory, he would be the first to deride, but which is the only state of things under which land can be "held in common" to any appreciable extent, or the "rights" of those whom he calls "the poor" can exist without being the "wrong" of the whole nation.
After having indulged in the farrago of nonsense – but mischievous nonsense – to which we have referred, Mr Chamberlain wisely told his Ipswich audience that he would "try not to lay down any absolute platform" for the Liberal party, but would endeavour to indicate what they should do, especially in the way of "social legislation." As time and space forbid us to discuss several interesting suggestions under this fruitful head, we must content ourselves with a reference to those which concern the special object of our present criticism. Having done something to set the labouring classes against the "private owners" of land, Mr Chamberlain could not of course be satisfied without an attempt to set farmers against their landlords. The farmers are told that "the three F's" are almost within their reach, and that this is a prospect which their new adviser (not being himself a landowner) does not "regard with alarm." But, according to his view, "the main obstacle seems to be in the farmers themselves. It is, in the first place, in the way in which they play into the hands of their landlords, and give them their support in propositions which would not be of the slightest advantage to the farmers themselves and in the second place, it is owing to the condition of existing tenancies. Most of our English farmers hold rather large farms. They have not sufficient capital," &c. &c. And then, telling his audience that "we import every year from £25,000,000 to £30,000,000 of produce, in the shape of butter, eggs, cheese, poultry, fruit, and vegetables, which ought to be grown in this country," Mr Chamberlain declares that "this kind of cultivation will only prosper when it is in the hands of small cultivators;" – "and so we come back to what, after all, is the most urgent and pressing need of all, – that we shall, as far as may be, go back to the old-time freeholds in the land, and re-establish the peasant and yeoman."
We pause with astonishment as we read these words. Can these be the sentiments of the Radical Free-trader Mr Chamberlain? They carry us back at once to the Corn-law debates of 1846, wherein we shall find it again and again urged by the Protectionist speakers that the removal of "protection to British industry" would, as one inevitable result, diminish the number of "peasants," and drive from amongst us this very class of small landed proprietors which we are now told it is so essential to restore! What was the real meaning of that great struggle between Protection and Free-trade? It meant that the producers in England had, in process of time, be-
