e that under our present system no
enhancement is, or could be, _absolutely_ injurious; it might be so
_relatively_--it might be so in relation to the poor consumer; but in
the mean time, that guinea which might be lost to the consumer would
be gained to the farmer. Now, in the case supposed, under a free corn
trade the rise is commensurate to the previous injury sustained by the
farmer; and much of the extra bonus reaped goes to a foreign interest.
What we insist upon, however, is this one fact, that alternately the
British corn-laws have raised the price of grain and have sunk it;
they have raised the price in the case where else there would have
been a ruinous depreciation--ruinous to the prospects of succeeding
years; they have sunk it under the natural and usual oscillations of
weather to be looked for in these succeeding years. And each way their
action has been most moderate. For let not the reader forget, that on
the system of a sliding-scale, this action cannot be otherwise than
moderate. Does the price rise? Does it threaten to rise higher?
Instantly the very evil redresses itself. As the evil, _i.e._ the
price, increases, in that exact proportion does it open the gate to
relief; for exactly so does the duty fall. Does the price fall
ruinously?--(in which case it is true that the _instant_ sufferer is
the farmer; but through him, as all but the short-sighted must see,
the consumer will become the reversionary sufferer)--immediately the
duty rises, and forbids an accessary evil from abroad to aggravate the
evil at home. So gentle and so equable is the play of those weights
which regulate our whole machinery, whilst the late correction applied
even here by Sir Robert Peel, has made this gentle action still
gentler; so that neither of the two parties--consumers who to live
must buy, growers who to live must sell--can, by possibility, feel an
incipient pressure before it is already tending to relieve itself. It
is the very perfection of art to make a malady produce its own
medicine--an evil its own relief. But that which here we insist on,
is, that it never _was_ the object of our own corn-laws to increase
the price of corn; secondly, that the real object was a condition of
equipoise which abstractedly is quite unconnected with either rise of
price or fall of price; and thirdly, that, as a matter of fact, our
corn-laws have as often reacted to lower the price, as directly they
have operated to raise it; whilst even