injurious alike to the farmer and the manufacturer, and the labourers and operatives they employed. He proposed, "The gentlemen who voted in the minority on Mr. Villiers' motion." This drew out Mr. Brotherton, who was not the less effective that he did not attempt to be oratorical. Mr. Holland Hoole proposed, "The manufacturing and agricultural classes; may their mutual interests be a bond of union between them." On this, Mr. Clay; spoke asserting that the interest of the landowners would be more promoted by encouraging a more careful cultivation of the soil than by protection.
And here let us advert, for a moment, to a remark of Miss Martineau in her "History of England during the thirty years' peace," in reference to the Anti-Corn-Law agitators. She says "They set to work with a zeal, a knowledge, a pertinacity, and a spirit of self-sacrifice, probably unequalled in the history of peaceful agitation. When their work was done, and they looked back upon its beginning, they were surprised to find how little they themselves knew when they first devoted themselves to the cause. The deepest of them had scarcely an idea how closely the interest of the agriculturists were involved in the establishment of a free trade in food, and how society was injured through all its ramifications by an artificial restriction in the first article of human necessity." No doubt the various bearings of the question became better understood the more it was discussed but I can aver that, from the very commencement of the agitation, the mutual dependance of agricultural and manufacturing interests had been made a strong point by the advocates of free commerce. It was so at all the meetings in Manchester, from the time of Dr. Bowling's visit in September to the meeting of the Chamber of Commerce, in December, 1838; at that meeting it bore a prominent part in the discussion; and at this great meeting in January, 1839, almost every speaker adverted to it. Probably Miss Mar-
