sent crisis, to grant our aid in exploding a few of the more prominent of these political fallacies. Not the least obstructive is the notion that because the Corn-laws are passed that they must necessarily be persisted in— that there never has been any retrograde legislation in a question of foodthat a law which serves to popularise a constitution, or advance democracy, cannot be repealed. This fallacy. is ably combated by Sir Edward. Premising that there is all the difference in the world between a question of constitutional change and a question of political economy or fiscal arrangement, still Sir Edward shows that John Bull has, like others, been often glad to abrogate changes both in one and the other:

You yourself, John, once advanced into a republic, put your foot into it, and drew back into monarchy as fast as you could. Again, you once transacted your affairs through a triennial parliament, yet you very soon made a retrograde movement, and are still compelled to grant a seven years' lease to the occupiers of St. Stephen's, notwithstanding all the arguments of the National Reform League to prove that lease a great deal too long for your interests as landlord. You have only to look to the foreign news in the Times to see that it was but as the day before yesterday, compared with your long life, when universal suffrage was proclaimed in France; and but as yesterday that a law has been passed which shakes off a weighty per-centage from the suffrage so recently created. And the whole history of Europe, for the last few years, does little more than chronicle the sudden enactment and as sudden repeal of charters and constitutions which wiseheads declared to be the irrevocable advance of entire populations. You know, therefore, that even a political step backward has been taken, sometimes because of the brute force of a despot-but sometimes, also, as the voluntary choice of a nation. The Sed revocare gradum applies to progress, not towards the region where we all wish to go, but to its dismal antipodes. It is only the first step to the infernal regions which Virgil so emphatically implies that mortal man can never recal.-Dii meliora! But, bless your heart, my dear John, as to changes and rechanges in commercial regulations, in duties and non-duties upon produce, raw and manufactured-what man in his senses, or with no more knowledge of history than he could pick up at a grammar-school, ever dreamed that laws affecting them were not, by their very nature, experiments, and the most liable of all laws to revision or repeal? "Ay-but corn--the staple of food-the big loaf?" The very thing, my dear John, of all others, that your experience tells you has been most subject to the mutability inherent to affairs mundane and mortal.

What, did we never try this experiment before? Why, throughout all the dark ages, the importation of foreign corn was substantially free. For about five hundred years that experiment was tried; and much good it did to commerce and manufactures,-much good it did to the condition of the people; and well it prevented fluctuations, scarcity, and famine! Free importation of corn! The duration of that experiment extends through the history of our barbarism. From the dawn of civilisation dates the record of Protection; it commenced under the dynasty of the House of York, in which commerce was first especially honoured and upheld,-in which, under a king who himself was a merchant, began that sagacious favour to the trading middle class, as a counterpoise to armed aristocracy, that, under the more tranquil intellect of Henry VII., created the civil powers ruling modern dominions; and that Protection, thus first admitted in theory, but long defeated in practice, can hardly be said to have been vitally and resolutely incorporated in our national system, till the very era that confirmed our constitutional freedom, and saw the rise of Great Britain to the rank it now holds amongst nations-the reign of William III.

Well; this Protection, first vigorously enforced at the Revolution of 1688, lasted for the best part of a century;" and under it," says the commercial historian, "the commerce and manufactures of the country were extended to an unprecedented degree." The country wished then, as now, to have some return to the system of those blessed five centuries of Free Trade in corn; and in 1773 a law was passed which a few years ago would have satisfied, I suspect, Manchester itself; for foreign wheat was permitted to be imported on paying a nominal duty of 6d. whenever the home price was at or above 48s. per quarter. The nation tried that May.-VOL. XCII. NO. CCCLXV.

F

plan for about eighteen years, and then what did it do?-this England that the newspapers tell us "never goes back!"-why, it went back, of course! And the price at which foreign importation could take place at 6d., was raised in 1791 from 488. to 54s.; while under 50s. the home producer was protected by a duty of 24s. 3d. And observe this date, 1791! Was that a period when the temper of the times was peculiarly submissive, and inclined towards political retrogression? It was a time more democratic than this,-a time when the spirit of the first French Revolution was at work through all the great towns of the empire. "But the people cried out? There were riots, rebellions, for the sake of the big loaf?" Not a bit of it, my dear John! The people were a sensible people; as the English are in the long run; they had tried their experiment,-did not like it. "And," says Mr. M'Culloch, with a candid sigh, "there was a pretty general acquiescence in the act of 1791."

"Pretty general acquiescence!" The admission is satisfactory in extent, but lukewarm in expression; the truth is, that no more popular act passed throughout the whole reign of George III.

And yet "laws against protection are never repealed! as well repeal the Reform Act!-England never goes back!-A law about corn is as fixed as the nod of Jove!" And all the while you are going back to the reigns of the Norman and Plantagenet! and insisting on the stability of experimental legislature upon the very article and in the very mode upon which the history of civilisation abounds the most with precedents of change!

Another very common fallacy in connexion with free trade is, that to abandon it is to abandon freedom itself. The Americans are as free and progressive a people as one can well suppose to exist, but they have evinced no peculiar affection for free trade. The French seem pretty well disposed to go all lengths in democracy, but they still maintain rather strict notions as to the value of protection. Nothing is more evident, indeed, than that protection, whether it be wise or not, is perfectly consistent with the freest opinions on politics. Other, but less tangible, fallacies are met with in the doctrines of the free traders themselves, but as their authorities contradict one another, these fallacies are, in fact, attested by themselves. Thus the League Circular asserted that bread would be cheaper by the repeal of the Corn-laws. Mr. Cobden, on the contrary, exclaimed, in his speech at Winchester, "The idea of low-priced corn is all a delusion; provisions will be no cheaper." Mr. Villiers acknowledged that the cheapening of bread must sooner or later produce the cheapening of labour. That subtle intellect rested half his case on the necessity of lowering wages-not in agricultural districts, but in manufacturing towns -in order to compete with the foreigner. His fellow political economist, Colonel Torrens, said just the contrary. "The true cause of low wages is high food; for then mechanical power is brought more and more in competition with human labour, and the operative will be employed at wages reduced to the slavery point." "The repeal of the Corn-laws must lower the wages," says Mr. Villiers. "It must raise them," says Colonel Torrens. Every fact, real or supposed, adduced by the Manchester Chamber of Commerce, tended to show the necessity of conforming to the low wages of the Continent:

The further we advance in the polemics of Free Trade, the more the perplexity gathers: not a result but has its separate free-trading prophet, and not a prophet that does not belie his brother. "Will rents fall?" murmurs the timid landowner. "Fall? of course, you vampire!" cries the Manchester Chamber of Commerce; "you have been living on the capital of the farmer ever since the peace." "Certainly they will fall," says Mr. Villiers, with polite indifference to so small a calamity.

"Fall?-they will rise!" exclaims Colonel Torrens. "They will rise," says Mr.

W. W. Whitmore, who was a very popular prophet in his day. "Pooh! don't believe them, my dear Vampire," argues that dear, good Mr. Wilson; my "object in removing these Corn-laws is to increase the value of your land!"

The Farmer puts his question, "Will these horrible prices last for ever; and how many quarters of grain are likely to be imported?"

And straight, therewith, arises such a discord of contradictory answers, all equally positive, and equally contradictory, that poor Chawbacon, if he have any animal desire still to have bacon to chaw, thinks it best to escape from the hubbub, and stick to his old motto, “Live and let live in the land we live by."

Now, my dear Free Traders, own that the honestest vampire who ever set out on his travels in search of an understanding, has had very little chance to find it amongst you! Shall he be enlightened with Mr. Villiers? then he can't be enlightened with Mr. Wilson. How can he get rid of his fallacies, when every opinion he picks up in exchange from one free trader is remorsely condemned as a fallacy by the rhetoric of another?

As far as history and experience go, the prosperity of the greatest commercial nations has been always attained under systems of protection. The longest pre-eminence in commerce ever enjoyed by a state, since Carthage, is that of Venice; and that pre-eminence was attained under a system that grasped at monopoly, and entrenched itself under every imaginable rigidity of protection. So jealous were the Genoese of competition, that they stipulated with kings to banish their mercantile rivals.

It is clear, therefore, that what is one man's meat may be another man's poison. It is natural that the Manchester manufacturer should be desirous of competing with the German; it is natural that the German should, at present, beg to be excused; it is natural that the Cracovian corn-grower should be desirous of competing with the English; it is natural that the English corn-grower should be unwilling to have that honour thrust upon him. A state can adopt no dogma for universal application, whether of Protection or Free Trade. In those branches in which it produces more or better supplies at less cost, it must naturally court Free Trade; in those branches where its produce is less or its cost greater than that of its neighbours, it must either consent to the certain injury, the possible ruin of that department of industry, or it must place it under Protection. Free Trade, could it be universally reciprocal, would therefore benefit Manchester versus Germany, and injure Lincolnshire versus Poland. The English cotton manufacturer thoroughly understands this when he says with Mr. Cobden, “Let us have Free Trade and we will beat the world!" But the world does not want to be beaten! Prussia, France, and even America, prefer "stupid selfishness" and protected manufactuers, to enlightened principles and English competition. When the English manufacturer says, "he wants only Free Trade to beat the world," he allows the benefit of Protection to his rivals, and excuses them for shutting their markets in his face.

But whether Free Trade be, in all cases, right or wrong, every one has allowed that we can't have it. To Free Trade, fairly and thoroughly carried out, there are more than fifty million obstacles to be found-in the Budget.

That we must lay certain duties on certain foreign articles of general consumption, and cramp the home producer by the iron hand of the exciseman, are facts enforced upon our attention, every time the miserable man doomed to hold the office of Chancellor of the Exchequer, goes through the yearly agonies of his financial statement. Free Trade, too, in the proper acceptation of the term, by all the laws of grammar and common sense, requires two parties to the compact-the native and the foreigner. Between you and me, John, I see no hope of the foreigner. I wish, however, to raise no argument upon this against the policy of our tariffs. Reciprocity may be good; but I allow that it is not essential. Whereever it is for our interest to open our markets, it would be idle to wait till the foreigner, against his idea of his interests, opened his own. All that I would observe is, that such one-sided liberality may be judicious and politic, but it has no right to the appellation of Free Trade.

But the name matters little; and the real question that now opens

before us, is the special application of a special principle to the com modity of grain. Free trade at present means the free importation of foreign corn. Now, in respect to this question, it is commonly held by political economists that it is the interest of two nations to exchange with one another two sorts of commodities as often as the relative cost is different in the two countries. The general proposition cannot be disavowed, and yet it will somehow or other happen, and that very frequently too, that there is a still stronger interest not thus to interchange particular articles; and Sir Edward Bulwer Lytton illustrates this view of the case by two equally happy and strong instances:

For instance, Athens manufactures admirable weapons at a cheaper cost than Boeotia; Boeotia produces corn, which Athens very much needs, at a much cheaper cost than Athens. Is it to the interest of Athens to exchange her weapons for the corn? Not if she has cause to dread the hostility of Boeotia, and believes that the weapons she thus sends out, will be used with advantage against her freedom and existence. There is an interest to effect exchange with two sorts of commodities, the relative cost of producing them being very different in the two countries, upon the abstract general principle; but, in the special case, a much stronger interest not to furnish Boeotia with weapons.

Take another case. Suppose Germany has lately instituted a cotton manufacture, but produces cotton goods with greater labour (that is, more cost) than England, and England, on the other hand, produces corn at more cost than Germany. Is it for the interest of Germany to exchange her corn for the English cotton goods? No; for, as it has been seen, we have Mr. Porter's assurance that nothing but protective duties can preserve the German cotton manufacture from ruin, as against the English competition. Therefore, here again, though, on the abstract general principle, it is the interest of Germany to exchange with England two sorts of commodities, of which the relative cost is different, yet she has a stronger interest, in the special case, to guard the cotton manufactures, which may ultimately enrich her much more than the price she receives for the corn that she sends into England. So, finally, without in the least disputing the abstract proposition of Mr. Mill, a statesman may well consider, that, seeing the importance to England of a thriving and prosperous agriculture, and all the danger to the state that may be incurred by the impoverishment and disaffection of many millions of his countrymen, there is a greater interest, in the special case, to limit an exchange which may be as injurious, for a time at least, to the British husbandman, as Germany holds it injurious to the German cotton manufacturer. For the political economist deals with the dead principle-the statesman, with the living men.

This is only a tithe of the bearings of this important question; to those who would consider the subject in its more serious phases, or study it in its true relations, we would earnestly recommend a perusal of Sir Edward Bulwer Lytton's pamphlet. The great questions between landowners and land cultivators, reduced at South Notts the other day to the practical position of diversity of interests, are alone passed by too slightly. Sir E. Bulwer Lytton writes now professedly as a landlord, but he vindicates the opinions he expressed and the vote he gave ten years ago, when he was a labourer (a literary labourer). He then recorded the opinion he now professes, viz., "that a total repeal of the Corn-laws would ultimately prove injurious to society." An opinion in which, sooner or later, all who have anything at stake in the country will be forced to conjoin.

THE RED SPECTRE OF 1852.*

"THE RED SPECTRE" is not, as might at first be imagined, one of those supernatural illusions to which a sanguinary hue has imparted additional horror or an unusually terrific interest-it is a bonâ fide spectre of Red Republicanism, conjured up by the at once timorous yet zealous brain of the some-time prefect and author of "L'Ere des Cæsars"-M. A. Romieu-in order to carry out the views promulgated in that work, and the statements made that Socialism, Red Republicanism, and the most fearful revolutionary horrors, are in abeyance even in 1852; unless military force, under a purely irresponsible iron despotism, is brought to bear against the monster which threatens France with its open jaws.

66

Signs," says M. Romieu, "accumulate: every one now perceives them; a kind of dumb terror has crept into the very bones of the smallest and the greatest; the RED SPECTRE OF 1852, which at first no one would see, and which I again evoke, is now apparent before the stupified gaze of all. Every day, every hour, its threatening proportions are amplified; it seems that a great natural phenomenon must be accomplished, and that every creature should possess an instinctive sense of the fact."

General Cavaignac, M. Romieu goes on to tell us, might, after the bloody victory of June, have strangled the monster, and saved civilisation; but he was the child of his age, deeply imbued with all the false notions of the day. That horrible struggle of the poor peasant against the better classes, resembling what was once called "La Jacquerie," is everywhere, he tells us, imminent. Hatred against the rich, wherever there are any rich; hatred against the petit bourgeois, wherever there are none but the poor; hatred against the farmer, where there are nothing but labourers; hatred of the low against the high, among all degrees; such is France at the present moment.

"And what," asks M. Romieu, "is being done, in face of the approaching catastrophe? Playing the stupid comedy called 'Politics;' a comedy that is enacted in rags on a ruined theatre. I am among the most turbulent of those," continues the ex-prefect," who hiss at this spectacle. Actors and decorations have a ghostly effect upon me, and look as if they had come forth from their sepulchres, clad in their shrouds, to try and hold their seats among the living."

The actors of existing times, M. Romieu adds, speak of human rights. Every one differs as to what those rights are, according to his own wants and views. They are words of human invention, which have been used to take the place of faith and of humility, of forbearance, and of resignation and contentment; but they have themselves no meaning, and are merely a fertile theme for discussion and dispute. "The times of faith are gone by, and, till God resuscitates them, we shall flounder in the false, the incoherent, the absurd. Our times have gone in advance of all that the fancy of our fathers could have ever dreamt of; without going further back, with what insulting smiles would the intimation of the Prince de Joinville's candidateship for the Presidency of the French Republic in 1852, have been re

* Le Spectre Rouge de 1852. Par M. A. Romieu.