The Sun.
London, England, 1844-08-08 00:00:00

farmer that for every quarter of wheat that he
takes to the market, he pays twenty shillings at
the very least to the landlord for rent. Now,
you must know, that in a 'good system of
husbandry only one acre out of four, sometimes only
one acre out of five, is devoted to the growth of wheat
for ten consecutive years, yet the farmer still con-
tinues to pay rent, whether the land be sown with
turnips, lies fallow, or is merely green sward. The
farmer seems not to have discovered this trick. It

has been proved to demonstration that if the farmer
paid no rent at all he could sell his wheat at 275. the
quarter, get as good a profit on his capital, pay his
labourers, and feed every horse about his farm just as
well as he does now, and yet the landlord continues
to bambooale him in this way. There is one little
incident which I think is likely to bring the farmers
to a favourable consideration of this question. We
have lately had a free trade in wool, and whilst wheat
is tumbling down, wool is improving in price. Now
the manufacturers do not complain of the high price
of wool. They do not complain in Leeds, where so
much cloth is made; and in Bradford and Huddersfield
they are all getting quite saucy with good trade.
They do not complain of the high price of wool, so
that it be a natural price, and, in that case, they care
not whether it be sd. or ls. 3d. a pound. Now, Ido
hope that this wool question may be the the means of
opening the eyes of some of the farmers. I perceive
that some of the county Members have become some-
what enlightened lately. I have got a newspaper—a
Hertford newspaper—which gives an account of a
meeting held at Hemel Hempstead, at the wool fair,
which was attended by Mr. Dudley Ryder, whom I
never heard in the House of Commons, but who is, I
am told, exceedingly valuable when abusing the
League. But do not let us abuse him, for Ido not
despair of seeing him become a capital free-trader.
Mr. Dudley Ryder, and his friend Lord Grimston,
attended the wool fair last year, and it so
happened that, on the day the wool fair
was held, a motion came on in the House of Com-
mons, made by Mr. Wood, the Member for Halifax,
for the abolition of the duty on foreign wool. Mr.
Dudley Ryder, on addressing his friends and consti-
tuents at Hemel Hempstead, said " This very even-
ing, there is a motion brought forward in the House of
Commons, a proposition for lowering the duty on
wool. Lord Grimston and myself intend to go back
to town by the six o'clock train, in order to oppose that
motion ; for I do not think that with 45,0001b5. of
wool in Hemel Hempstead, we want much more from
abroad."—(Loud cheers and laughter.) Well, back
went these two distinguished senators by the six
o'clock train, and they arrived in time in the House
of Commons not to hear arguments, for that they
did not want, but they arrived in time to vote against
Mr. Wood's motion for taking off the duty on wool.
That was last year, 1843. A few weeks ago, there
was another fair at Hemel Hempstead, and attended
by the farmers there, and these two Hon.
Members attended, I suppose ; but in the
meantime the Government had brought for-
ward a motion for the abolition, totally and imme-
diately, of the duty on foreign wool, and these two
consistent senators had supported the Government in
that measure.—(Laughter.) Mr. Dudley Ryder, it
appeared, had primed himself for a speech. His
health was proposed, and in replying, the Honourable
Gentleman said—" That the question to which their
attention was specially called on that occasion referred
to wool. At this moment it was rather an important
question ; because, it was known that the Government
had introduced a measure for the purpose of doing
away with the duty on foreign wool." He then told
them that foreign wool obtained higher prices than
our own. I think he must have fortunately stumbled
on one of the articles of Mr. Wilson, the economist.
For he goes on to state that he " had arrived at the
conclusion that it was to our interest to obtain our
wools from abroad at the lowest price. It appeared
that in Hertfordshire the produce was almost exclu-
sively, if not entirely, short stapled wool.—(Cries
from the meeting of ' No, no.') He went on to
say that he did not believe they produced much of
either kind." Mr. Dudley Ryder, however, did not
seem pleased with the interruption, and he went on
in a rather abrupt and brusque manner, saying—" I
took the liberty of stating a fact, for, after all, this
question must be decided by facts alone, theories
might be very fine, but in dealing with a question
of this kind, experience, and not theories, must de-
cide. He said that it was an incontrovertible fact
that in proportion as they admitted foreign wool at a
low rate of duty the native wool rose in price; and he
did not think that that happy union between native
and foreign wool-growers ought to be dissolved by a
Doctors-Commons fiat, or that the mutual engage-
ments should be destroyed." Now I call that a
rather odd sort of wool-gathering in the course of a
year. One little fact is rather striking, that Mr.
Dudley Ryder, who was sent up in 1841 to protect
the agriculture of Hertfordshire, should not know
whether long wool or short wool was grown in that
country.—(Cheers.) It goes far to confirm my
opinion, formed when quietly stock-taking on the
benches of the House of Commons, that the county
Members in the House of Commons—there are a few
splendid exceptions, such as Mr. Posey, for instance
—who are sent up to protect agriculture, are about as
ignorant of the political state of the country as any man
in it. This Mr. Ryder seems to be a choice specimen of
that class, though he was not equal to one I have
heard of in a county in the north of England in the
course of my tour. A young gentleman was brought
down fresh from Oxford to be a candidate ; he rode
with a farmer round his farm, who showed him
spacious fields of turnips, of twenty or twenty-five
acres in extent, in the Scotch fashion. The young
gentleman was surprised, and said, " I knew that
turnips were eaten with boiled mutton, but I had no
idea that people consumed so many of them."—
(Great laughter.) But I have no doubt that very
great progress in the right direction 'will be made in
the course of the next six months, in the agricultural
districts, upon one question. And we must afford to
wait, whether we like it or not ; we cannot pro-
gress faster than the nature of things permits us.
But I am sorry to say that the false doctrines pro-
mulgated by some of the monopolist organs appear
to have had some very serious and dangerous ten-
dencies in the agricultural districts. I have read a
striking instance of it in a trial at the late Suffolk
assizes. A man named James Lancaster had been
reading the Morning Post, for that was stated speci-
fically in the reports ; he could read it seemed, but
he could not write, and that is just the class of intel-
lect likely to read the Morning Post regularly.—
(Laughter.) Well, he had been reading the Morn-
ing Post, and there he saw it stated that wages rose
as the price of corn rose, that a great abundance of
corn made prices low, and consequently made wages
low also. Now James Lancaster appears to
have had a logical mind, but unfortunately he had
applied it exclusively to the study of the Morning
Post—(Laughter)---and he determined to carry out
practically the principles laid down in that eminent
print. He reasoned in his mind thus :—"Wages de
peed on the price of corn ; the price of corn is low,
because it is' abundant; the only way to make
corn dearer, is to make it scarcer; and as
we can only get higher wages by making corn
scarce, I'll go and set fire to farmer Hobbes's corn
stacks."—(Hear, hear.) Now, do not suppose that I
am making up this story. I have liot added a syl-
lable to what has appeared in the public papers ; and
Baron Alderson said, with his wig on, and with all the
gravity of a Judge, " This is a most strange and ex-
traordinary application of the doctrines of political
economy." But for the people who can read, but who
can't write, and who, therefore, only read the Morn-
ing Post, it was a logical deduction. James Lancas-
ter had no enmity against farmer Hobbes ; he would
not touch his house, his horses, or his cows ; he had
read that corn and bread alone regulated wages, so he
would not burn his cheese-room or his cellar, but he
took his torch and applied it to his wheat stacks, and
set fire to them, in order to make corn scarce, and
thereby raise wages. I think the doctrine of the
Morning. Post may hereafter be called the philosophy
of the lucifer match.—(Loud cheers and laughter.)
But James Lancaster, it seems is to be transported
for the term of his natural life, to propagate the
doctrines of the Morning Post in Australia. Now,
I want to ask you seriously what the difference is in
principle—for I know the law makes a very great
difference—between creating an artificial scarcity, by
preventing that corn, which the Almighty has given
to the nations of the world, and has spread over the
whole surface of the earth in bountiful abundance,
from coming into the country, unnaturally obstruct-
ing the supply, and making it scarce by burning
Farmer Hobbes's stacks ?—(Cheers.) Their plea, in
both cases, is the same. The law-makers, who make
a law to keep. out American corn, say they do it to
keep up wages. James Lancaster made the same
confession of faith, on the treadmill, to his fellow
prisoner, while the gaoler of the prison was
pretending to be asleep ; and where is the
difference in effect between the two principles ?
The effect is the same on the poor starving
wretch who wants food and cannot get it,
because of this law, as if that want was caused by the
burning down of Farmer Hobbes's corn-stacks. And
I suspect that, in the sight of Heaven, half of the men
who support the corn.laws, will stand acquitted less
than James Lancaster.—(Loud cheers, several times
renewed.) Yes, I repeat it; the men who know
what they are doing—and many men who support the
system do know, and can see the consequences of
what they are doing, for a selfish object—are more to
blame than that poor wretch, if he was sincere in the
object he avowed he had for his crime.—(Cheers.)
You have heard from our worthy chairman that
though we are departing, though we are taking our
leave of you, and like another class of performers on
this stage, we are going into the provinces—vet, do
not believe that we intend to be idle during our ab-
sence from the metropolis. And we hope we may
leave with a conviction that those friends of the
cause who have constantly attended our meetings,
will not, in their individual capacities, either as poli-