ABSTRACT
Englishmen! you give much capital, much skill, much labour, for a little profit, a little enjoyment, a very little food steeped in bitter sweat and tears. But why do you not obtain remuneration for your capital, skill, and labour? Because your landowners will not let you. By a vast expenditure of blood and treasure, you have enabled them to decide, that society shall overbuild its base, until the edifice fall and crush them. Patient, long-suffering, and long-eared Englishmen! your ears are, at least, as long as your sufferings, or you would not have fought twenty-six years for a Bread-Tax! It is retributive upon you – the hand of God is in it – that all your miseries can be traced to your wars on French liberty. Where did you win your Bread-Tax? You won it at Waterloo. You have since been reminded of that fact – at Peterloo, and elsewhere. You will again be reminded of it, whenever it shall please the Great Unpaid – or, as it would now seem, any one of his Majesty’s coroners – to shoot a dozen or so of you, at a quarter of an hour’s notice, and justify a massacre by a glazier’s bill, on the authority of a law made by the pensioned Parliament of Charles the Second, which sate seventeen years, and was itself an usurpation! Yes, and I fear you will again deserve to be told by your oppressors, with a sneer or a frown, that they have an instrument in the Grand Jury, (made by the same Parliament?) by which they can, at any time, secure impunity to official butchers. If these things are true, I need not ask whether the Corn-Laws were inflicted upon you by 290an insolent aristocracy, as a tribute on a conquered people; but I ask, why any free people should endure them? why any man of common sense, or common feeling, should support them? It seems like an insult to ask, why men who work with their hands, should support laws which at once raise the price of food, by restricting the supply, and lower that of labour by lessening the demand? Yet if there were not millions of such persons now living in this country, the Corn-Laws would not exist an hour longer. Let me, then, go through the various classes of British society, one by one, and inquire whether there really is any one class that has an interest in supporting these Corn-Laws.
