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torn were removed ) and we will give you thirty or forty 4 hil * lings-worth of corn in exchange . " This is exactly what is done , but few will listen to the fact , chiefly because it seems tod plain , and they cannot imagine how successive Legislatures and Representatives could possibly have been so stupid , so dis * honest , or both . Nor will people listen even at present to the able writer from whose work we are taking these extracts *
" When a corn-law was first laid on , either in Boothia or here , it is likely enough that a spirit of encouragement might be given to the farming trade , by the rise of prices which at the time ensued . But the farmers would soon multiply , and the demand come down , till the two ends met , and the farmers were in exactly the same condition as before , except that there were four of them bidding against one another for farms instead of three , and that there was moreover this new feature in their
case , that they were cut off from employment for their children in other directions , in consequence of the check put upon the general industry of the country . Their only way of getting with any comfort out of the scrape , would be simply this ;—they must ask to have foreign corn ad- ^ mitted into Boothia again , not all at once , but by such gradations as shall allow £ he good they will derive from the openings made for the employment of their children in industry of other kinds than fanning , and from
the general prosperity of the country , io something like keep pace with the temporary depression which may arise to the farming trade during the process of returning to an honest system , —such depression being in fact the converse or counterpart to that spirt of improvement to their trade , which was stated as the temporary consequence of laying on the prohibition . And when they have got out of the bog , the next thing they have to do is to take care never to come there again , and to eat off
their own fingers sooner than think of employing them in trying to take money out of their friends ' , the manufacturers pockets , by a corn-law . This is what they must come to at last ; and there is no occasion for any quarrelling , any ill-will . The process is going on fast enough . The harpoon is in their backs , and they know it . They may thrash for gom 6 time with their tail , and spout a little yet through their blow-holes in Parliament ; but they must turn the white up before long , and then they will come alongside and be ours . "—Pp . 35 , 36 *
The white of their bellies , we presume , or perhaps of those eyes , which were " bigger . " It is thus that greediness works its own punishment in disease and disappointment . The foregoing extracts are taken from the Letters of a Representative to his Constituents / during the session of 1836 . In our Critical Notices of last month , we said what we thought of th&
book : we say again , it should be studied by all thorough-gdiflg reformers . The account given by any true * Representative' 6 f the understanding and honesty , or total deficiency of both , iii that body of « Representatives / as they are called , in whom the nation ' s alternating hopes , doubts , and despair , are centred , must necessarily possess great interest in itself . But whan
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Our Representatives * 9
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Citation
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Monthly Repository (1806-1838) and Unitarian Chronicle (1832-1833), Jan. 2, 1837, page 7, in the Nineteenth-Century Serials Edition (2008; 2018) ncse.ac.uk/periodicals/mruc/issues/vm2-ncseproduct1827/page/7/
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