It is quite refreshing, after these petty tornados of statistical dust-cloud, wherein the facts are the dust, and the wind which moves them some prejudice or opinion which, right or wrong, is utterly independent of them, to turn to Professor Low's "Appeal to the Common Sense of the Country," and there find the whole question argued, as it ought to be, on the broad ground of reason.

We say, of reason, because we presume that Professor Low attaches this meaning to the term "Common Sense." It has too often a lower meaning. It is often loosely applied to the vulgar prejudices and mere animal experiences of the many; but these Professor Low must feel, as long as hunger is a fact, and dinner a necessity of the animal man, to be à priori absolutely in favour of free-trade, or any other means whereby the maximum of dinners can be attained. But if by common sense be meant the universal practical Reason, which is given alike to every man, in proportion as he is a man and not a brute, which is the same for all times, circumstances, and places-then that is the very ground on which we most joyfully meet him, as we think the only ground worthy of so great a question; and leaving the ledgerdust behind us, we will ask, with Professor Low,- Is Free-trade Rational or Absurd, Right or Wrong?

We had thought, certainly, that the "common sense" of Britain had been already appealed to on that point; and had given its verdict thereon in some such form as this:

"Necessaries are dearer or cheaper in proportion as there is less or more of them. You want protection, because it makes corn dearer, by keeping out foreign corn; in a word, by allowing less corn to be in England.-Is not that it?

"Well, then, if there is less corn in England than there might be, less bread will be eaten. Then either every one must eat less, or some must go without and be hungry. Now, as a fact, the working masses live on bread; and those who can afford it buy all they need at any price for themselves. They cannot stint themselves as long as they have a penny left: and so those who cannot afford bread enough to live on, starve. These men really exist. If you go into any of our great cities, and a large proportion of agricultural parishes, you may see them; not a fiction of free-traders, but live people, who have not bread enough to eat, and who could have enough, or something nearer enough, if bread was cheaper. Is not that common sense? Now we cannot have these people starving. Common sense tells us that is wrong. Fact tells us, too, that the more they starve, down to the very edge of famine, the faster they breed. And common sense tells us, that the faster they breed the more they will starve; and tells us also, that a time will

come, when between numbers and starvation they will begin (as indeed they seem more and more inclined to do daily) to eat, in default of bread, us and you. Is not that common sense?" "But," answered the Protectionists, "cheap bread will make low wages, and so the poor will be as ill off as ever."

"Not so," quoth British common sense, "for wages both fall and rise more slowly than the price of bread. They depend first on the numbers competing for work, and next on the price of other necessaries as well as bread-on rent, candles, soap, clothing; matters which cheap bread will cheapen. But even if their price remained the same, the minimum which a labourer will accept as wages depends not on bread alone, but on the combined prices of all his necessaries, and on his competing numbers. And therefore, just as when bread rises, the farmers never raise wages in the same ratio, so when bread falls, they will not be able-no employer will be able to lower wages in the same ratio, but in a less one; competition will settle that; if he does his men will not work for him. And, therefore, even if wages fall, the poor will be better off.”

"But," answered the Protectionists, "labourers will be thrown out of employ, and get no wages at all."

"that you

"If you mean," answered British common sense, will throw your own labourers out of employ, take care that Britain does not throw you out of employ in return. If you cannot cultivate the land profitably, it does not follow that no one else can. There is capital, science, and physical strength in England in plenty, and land too, for that matter, we had thought. Under our present commercial system we make money too fast for our own profit. It will be no more unprofitable, perhaps far more profitable, for us to get rid of our surplus capital by sinking it in uncertain agricultural speculations, which at all events will produce more food, than it is to sink it as we do now, in profitless railroads and repudiated loans. But even if we be wrong in our hope, it is better that the inferior soils go uncultivated, than that the masses go hungry. We have plenty of occupation, plenty of capital, to employ the discharged labourers."

"But you will make England dependent on foreign countries; and what if they went to war with us?"

The more we depend on them for corn, the more their capitalists, that is, their real rulers just now, will depend on us for profit; and, therefore, the less likely they will be to go to war. Besides, Britain is the queen of the seas; and even in the sharpest blockades of the late war, she found no difficulty in importing as much corn as you allowed her. How much more now, when our fleets are stronger, our commerce vaster, our colonies

in every part of the globe rapidly becoming producers, as well

as consumers?

"Besides," quoth British common sense, "Free-trade cannot injure us. What is right cannot go wrong, as long as God, and not the devil, rules the world. And Free-trade is right; Protection is wrong; every law or system which upholds one class to the injury of another, the few to the injury of the many, which actually, as in Great Britain now, diminishes the labourer's meals, and causes human beings to go hungry, is unjust and suicidal; it is an infraction of the great text, which is not merely an apothegm, but a moral lawHe that withholdeth corn, the people shall curse him; but blessings shall be on the head of him that selleth it.' No expediential arguments can ever weaken the moral and eternal justice of that truth. Artificially insufficient food is an evil to the labourer, and therefore also to the farmer, and to every other class; for we are all brothers, members of one body, with one common interest, and not as demagogues and protectionists alike assert, contradictory class-interests; if one member suffers, all the other suffer with it; especially if the suffering members be as now the motive limbs. For on the welfare of the working-classes, physical and spiritual, depends the commonweal of the whole. From them the higher ranks are continually recruited; on their vigour of body, intellect, and spirit, depend ultimately the productive power of the nation, without which capital, however enormous, must be idle and dead, or run to waste, as it has done so often in eastern despotisins; and anything which, like dear food, depresses them, the foundation-tier of the social pyramid, depresses in exactly the same proportion, every tier above it. Thus, just as in the extreme case, the existence of a slave-population works the certain degradation and ruin, even the physical extinction, of the free class which employs them, so does the existence of a needy, reckless, debauched, discontented and beggarly peasantry, such as disgraced France before the Revolution of 1793, and disgraces, alas! too many British counties now, avenge itself by increasing the very evils which have produced it, by making the farmer still more penurious, ignorant, and tyrannical-the landlord more neglectful, fastidious, profligate. God's laws are just, and avenge themselves."

Some such thoughts as these, dim and dumb perhaps, for we British are more given to do than to talk the wise thing, have already passed through the public mind, and found their practical utterance in the repeal of the Corn-Laws. Professor Low is as hasty in his facts, as he is uncharitable in his imputations, when he represents the Anti-Corn-Law agitation as a mere selfish trick of the commercial classes, an outgrowth of the "ped

Free Trade in Corn Righteous.

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lar spirit" against which he declaims so fiercely. If there had been no more than that in the hearts (there was certainly in the words) of such men as Bright and Cobden, we believe their movement would have had a very different fate. These men may have confused the righteousness of their object with its profitableness; they may have often appealed to lower motives, and to arguments which we should reprobate; but what gave them their strength was not that, but the consciousness both in them and in their hearers that they were doing a right thingthat they were, in the very deepest sense, making an "appeal to the common sense of the country." Therefore they arrayed on their side (a fact which Professor Low utterly ignores) not merely the commercial classes, but tithe-holding clergymen, who knew that free-trade must ultimately reduce their incomes; barristers and litterateurs, who cared nothing for political economy, and still less for trade; and the artizans of the great cities, who would have fought on barricades in the cause of freetrade at the very moment that they were sneering and growling at Mr. Cobden's harangues-" Cheap bread! curse him, he means cheap wages!"

Professor Low, then, is not, as he fancies, appealing from a lower to a higher court, but demanding, rather contrary to rule, a fresh trial in the same court with the same jury. However, if a judgment be wrong, we cannot be too ready to revoke it; or too hasty, if half of Professor Low's fears be correct; at all events, we are bound to give a fair hearing, and if possible, a fair answer, when a grave and well-read man deliberately utters, in a large and laborious pamphlet, Cassandra-prophecies of the approaching ruin and bankruptcy of the richest and almost the best-manned nation of the globe.

The pamphlet opens, of course, with an attack on Sir Robert Peel; which, as it was written before his death, we shall pass over. The British people have already pronounced a different verdict on that distinguished statesman.

The next forty pages of this "Appeal" to our common sense are taken up with vituperative attacks on political economists, and their theory of rents, as first propounded by Dr. J. Anderson, and since recognised, with modifications and improvements, by all writers of note on that subject. Nothing in Professor Low's pages appears to us to invalidate the received theory, much to corroborate it; as an appeal to common sense it must be useless, as it deals with abstruse propositions of commercial science in a way less comprehensible to the multitude than the profound writings of Chalmers or Mill; the thread of argument is most desultory, and often impalpable; the spirit full of animosity, sneers, reckless imputations of motive, things which are

usually considered to interfere with the exercise of common sense, by creating prejudices of every kind, first against the objects of the attack, and then against the writer who approaches open questions in so fierce and unfair a spirit. The large space devoted to the attempt to upset the received theory of rents, leaves on the reader's mind the old unavoidable conclusion to which "common sense" had probably brought him long ago, that the Protection in whose behalf all these rent-arguments are undertaken, is mainly a device for keeping those rents up.

Professor Low does not, indeed, deny this. He considers the height of rents as the index of agricultural prosperity: he therefore seems, as far as we can discover his meaning, to think that the way to secure prosperity is to keep rents up-very much like securing a fine day by nailing up the hand of the weatherglass. But we will let the subject pass. Professor Low's whole attack is aimed against Adam Smith, Ricardo, and the earlier schools. He seems to ignore the existence of such men as Senior, Porter, Mill, and Chalmers, and the improved and enlarged views which they have grounded on the discoveries of their predecessors. This may be a safe and easy method, but it simply reduces his whole argument to a paralogism; he puts himself in the position. of a man who should deny the discoveries of Herschel and Faraday, and assert the absurdity of all inductive science, because he had found hasty and incorrect applications of the primary laws of induction in Bacon's Novum Organum or Boyle's Origines.

We shall therefore proceed to consider a little that small proportion of Professor Low's pamphlet which really does bear on the comparative effects of Free-trade and Protection on agriculture and the industrious classes; among which latter, by the bye, he seems to include, somewhat strangely, landlords, simply in their quality of rent-receivers. And now, in answer to all these invectives against every class except those directly dependent on the land, by the epithets of dreamers, theorists, impostors, demagogues, &c., &c., and outcries against the pedlar-spirit which is ruining us; we beg to remind him, that besides "idola specus et theatri," the fallacies of the study and of the Anti-cornlaw oration, there exist, also, just as abundant, and just as pestiferous, "idola tribus," class-fallacies, and "idola fori," fallacies of the market-place, and that it is well worth his serious thought, whether British agriculture under the protective system has not been as much corrupted and nightmare-ridden by these latter, as any of the objects of his disdain. We boldly assert, that there is hardly a questionable opinion or practice for which the earlier political economists and the manufacturers are commonly blamed, which has not openly manifested itself in practice among the landlords and farmers of the last five-and-forty years, with