money which is here argued against; dear money ought to give cheap every thing else, and therefore, as already explained, be a blessing to this country; it being self-evidently necessary that we, Great Britain, as a nation which from limited territory is strictly an operative nation, that is, dependent on manufactures for its prosperity, should assimilate all its rates of value, as nearly as possible, to those of the nations with whom it has to deal. It is dear food, therefore, which is here condemned, and which being itself a curse, has changed what ought to have been a blessing, into a deepening of its own curse. But we live in a blockaded country, and therefore pay siege prices for first necessaries, and can get next to nothing for wrought goods.

CHAPTER VII.

THE LEGISLATING LANDLORD'S APOLOGY.

"BUT," say the landowners, "had we not sheltered raw produce from the operation of dear money, cheap food, and cheap raw material must have made land cheap, and this is just what we wished to avoid."

Grant, for argument sake, cheapness of land to be a necessary ultimate consequence of cheapness of food, which, however, shall hereafter be proved not to be the case, yet, without suffering the produce of land as well as every thing else to find its own level, and granting if necessary a proportionate reduction of every obligation to pay rent incurred prior to making money dear, the act of making money dear, was, in landowners, a dishonest act.

Here the question naturally arises: these principles being so simple, how came deliberate acts of parliament, to be so framed by the "collective wisdom of the nation," as to make first necessaries scarce; and, therefore, despite a restricted or en

THE LEGISLATING LANDLORD'S APOLOGY. 143

hanced currency, dear, and labour and all wrought goods, drugs in the market, and, therefore, despite the dearness of food, cheap?

Because, first necessaries are the produce of land, and land is the property of members of parliament; and votes of members of parliament constitute acts of parliament, and acts of parliament are laws. While labour, and wrought goods, which derive their principal value from the labour expended in their production, are the property of those who have neither seats nor votes in parliament, and who have therefore, or at least then, had no share in making laws.

This answer, though but a simple statement of facts, conveys an inference more harsh, it is hoped, than the unpalliated truth. Might not the first framers of those enactments, which doubled rents, and then bolstered doubled rents by corn laws, from gross ignorance, have felt an agreeable presentiment of being themselves gainers, without any very clear perception of who were to be the losers? Perhaps it did not occur to them to reflect, that no one can find a lost purse, unless some one else have lost one; and that, accordingly, they put the found purse, of rents doubled in value by an enhanced currency, and upheld against the just and natural effects of market prices by corn-laws, in their pockets, and only thought themselves fortunate. Now, however, that the spirit of truth is abroad, and the voice of

:

justice is crying aloud through the land, and proclaiming to whom the found purse belongs, and where, and when, and how it was lost, let us hope, that they who have found it, will no longer refuse to restore it to its rightful owner. In other words, that landowners will no longer refuse to abolish the corn laws: and that with a good grace, instead of waiting till they are compelled to do so, after having forfeited the respect of the nation; while, for what is past, let us still endeavour to apologise let us hope, that when farmers pleaded the impossibility of paying the same money rents in money doubled in value, that landlords, in shifting the burden from the shoulders of their tenants, to those of the customer, fancied they had discovered a happy device, by which they had satisfied the demands of justice; and that every body's money, being considered, by too many people, something like every body's businessnobody's; they perceived not the remoter consequences of these most pernicious enactments, some short explanation of which has been attempted, in the foregoing chapters on the cost, dead loss, and various other evils to the nation, of protections, monopolies, restrictions, and hindrances to trade of every kind; and the peculiar misery attendant on those effecting raw produce in particular.

CHAPTER VIII.

EVILS OF INDIRECT TAXATION.

"A tax may either take out or keep out of the pockets of the people, a great deal more than it brings into the public treasury, in four ways: First, the levying of it may require a great number of officers, whose salaries may eat up the greater part of the produce of the tax, and whose perquisites may impose another additional tax upon the people. Secondly, it may obstruct the industry of the people.-While it obliges people to pay, it may thus diminish the funds which might enable them more easily to do so. Thirdly, by the penalties which those incur, who attempt unsuccessfully to evade the tax, it may ruin them, and thereby put an end to the benefits which the community might have received from the employment of their capitals.”—Adam Smith.

THE indirect taxes are additional sources of national loss: they occasion, in the first place, the greater part of the expenditure of between three and four millions, the cost of collection, and the preventive service. They are at once the cause and the support of the demoralizing and waste-inducing system of smuggling. They are also

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