ired to pay all
these four great establishments.[4]

To understand the nature of the public debt of England a man has only
to suppose one great national establishment, twice as large as those
of the civil functionaries, the Army, Navy, and the Church together,
and composed of members with fixed salaries, who purchased their
commissions from _the wisdom of our ancestors_, with liberty to sell
them to whom they please--who have no duty to perform for the
public,[5] and have, like Adam and Eve, the privilege of going to
'seek their place of rest' in what part of the world they please--a
privilege of which they will, of course, be found more and more
anxious to avail themselves as taxation presses on the one side, and
prohibition to the import of the necessaries of life diminishes the
means of paying them on the other.

The repeal of the Corn Laws may give a new lift to England; it may
greatly increase the foreign demand for the produce of its
manufacturing industry; it may invite back a large portion of those
who now spend their incomes in foreign countries, and prevent from
going abroad to reside a vast number who would otherwise go. These
laws must soon be repealed, or England must reduce one or other of
its great establishments--the National Debt, the Church, the Army, or
the Navy. The Corn Laws press upon England just in the same manner as
the discovery of the passage to India by the Cape of Good Hope
pressed upon Venice and the other states whose welfare depended upon
the transit of the produce of India by land. But the navigation of
the Cape benefited all other European nations at the same time that
it pressed upon these particular states, by giving them all the
produce of India at cheaper rates than they would otherwise have got
it, and by opening the markets of India to the produce of all other
European nations. The Corn Laws benefit only one small section of the
people of England, while they weigh, like an incubus, upon the vital
energies of all the rest; and at the same time injure all other
nations by preventing their getting the produce of manufacturing
industry so cheap as they would otherwise get it. They have not,
therefore, the merit of benefiting other nations, at the same time
that they crush their own.[6]

For some twenty or thirty years of our rule, too many of the
collectors of our land revenue in what we call the Western
Provinces,[7] sought the 'bubble reputation' in an increase of
assessment up