tually, and traced through
succeeding years, equally the raising and the lowering have
co-operated to that steady temperature (or nearest approximation to it
allowed by nature) which is best suited to a _comprehensive_ system of
interests. Accursed is that man who, in speaking upon so great a
question, will seek, or will consent, to detach the economic
considerations of that question from the higher political
considerations at issue. Accursed is that man who will forget the
noble yeomanry we have formed through an agriculture chiefly domestic,
were it even true that so mighty a benefit had been purchased by some
pecuniary loss. But this it is which we are now denying. We affirm
peremptorily, and as a fact kept out of sight only by the neglect of
pursuing the case through a succession of years under the _natural_
fluctuation of seasons, that, upon the series of the last seventy
years, viewed as a whole, we have paid less for our corn by means of
the corn-laws, than we should have done in the absence of such laws.
It was, says Mr Cobden, the purpose of such laws to make corn dear; it
is, says he, the effect, to make it cheap. Yes, in the last clause his
very malice drove him into the truth. Speaking to farmers, he found it
requisite to assert that they had been injured; and as he knew of no
injury to them other than a low price, _that_ he postulated at the
cost of his own logic, and quite forgetting that if the farmer had
lost, the consumer must have gained in that very ratio. Rather than
not assert a failure _quoad_ the intention of the corn-laws, he
actually asserts a national benefit _quoad_ the result. And, in a
rapture of malice to the lawgivers, he throws away for ever, at one
victorious sling, the total principles of an opposition to the
law.[29]

[29] Those who fancy a possible evasion of the case
supposed above, by saying, that if a failure, extensive
as to England, should coincide with a failure extensive
as to Poland, remedies might be found in importing from
many other countries combined, forget one objection,
which is decisive--these supplementary countries must be
many, and they must be distant. For no country could
singly supply a defect of great extent, unless it were a
defect annually and regularly anticipated. A surplus
never designed as a fixed surplus for England, but
called for only now and then, could never be more than
small. Therefore the surplus,