The Sun.
London, England, 1844-05-09 00:00:00

posed a repeal of the "corn-laws were not foundel
upon patriotism, or worthy motives, but in order to
pay off marriage portions and heavy mortgaes. The I
greatest landed proprietor in the county in which
he resided had scarcely an apartment in his native
country in his own home, and there were a great
many more landed proprietors similarly situated. In
fact, the landed proprietors could not afford to live
upon much lower rents than they at present received.
An instance of the disposition and motives of land-
lords lately came under his notice. A poor woman
on the Duke of Buckingham's estate had lately be-
come a widow. The lease of her farmhad expired,
and she applied for a renewal of her lease. The lease
was, granted to her, but only on condition that her
son should be made a party to the contract. And
why was this ? In order that her son might have a
vote, and that vote should be given in favour of the Duke
of Buckingham and protection.—(Loud cries of
" Hear, hear.") And, not far .from the neighbour-
, hood in which he had resided, twenty or thirty
voters had been created for the sole purpose of
swelling the list of advocates in favour of protection.
He would not enter into a history of the mode in
which these votes were obtained, but he was sorry to
. say that there was nothing they would not stoop to
in order to sustain monopoly.

"Satan, the fowler, who betrays
The souls of men a thousand ways."
At times, the landlord class were much in favour of
purity of election, and at times they were, altogether
in favour of protection.

" When the Devil was sick,
The Devil a monk would be ;
When the Devil got well,
The Devil a monk was he."
The farmers in Aylesbury market, last Saturday,
seemedto have been considerablyshaken in Sir Robert
Peel. They said, " Oh, he has repealed the duty on _
wool ; he announced himself in favour of the con-
tinuance of the corn-laws as they stood, but he after-
wards proposed a measure for their modification, and
the reduction of the duty." "After these things," said
they, " what confidence can we place in him ?" He
was willing to be the Uriah of the cause.
He had stood it for a pretty long time; their shots
were nct lead, and their words would never kill any
honest man.—(Laughter and cheers.)
Mr. W. J. Fox then addressed the meeting. He
was received with loud and continued cheering. He
said, he spoke to them that evening under the dis-
advantage of having lost the earlier part of the pro-
ceedings, from a cause which he must make a plea
for their indulgence in what he did address to them
—namely, indisposition, which pressed upois him
even in the sight of so inspiring and magnificent a
meeting as this.—(Hear, hear.) And what could be
more inspiring 'and more magnificent than these
meetings were ? The long series of them, which
had now been held with unabated attention and zeal
—meetings gathered together to listen either to those
elementary and simple truths which every one knew,
or to the more recondite speculations and researches
of political economy, not often apt to gain the atten-
tion of multitudes—multitudes among whom every
heart glowed with as burning a sense of wrong as
ever nerved those who took the field to protect with
musket on their shoulder and sword by their side ;
yet who had blended this sense of wrong with a
patience as wise, and a forbearance as dignified, as
ever marked the best school of philosophers—meetings
which had made this place the asylum of truth and jus-
tice, when they had been banished from the mansions
of those whose station ought to have made them
the leaders of the people, and when those principles
had been violated in those legislative halls where
they ought to have been held sacred, their advocacy
of them here had procured them the blessing of the
entire mass of the community. He confessed for
himself he was sometimes weary of the statistics of
this question. Interesting as those statistics. were,
the list of deaths, which rose in proportion to the rise
in the price of food occasioned by these laws, the
long muster-roll of pauperism which kept up a con-
tinual pressure from year to year, the continual com-
mittals for crime which bore a constant proportion to
the fluctuations in the price of food ; the calculation
Of the number of poor children who died, above the
number of the children of the rich, in consequence of
their hard bringing up—not from natural causes, but
artificial laws which aggravated the disparity of con-
dition ; these, and all the other fearful items in that
account, though of a nature to harrow up the soul,
yet the continuance of those details drove them back
upon the plain and simple truth in which the whole
question was involved, and which contained all its
merits —he meant the fact that the "labo-urer is worthy
of his hire." In that was the beginning anti end of the
argument in his view of the question. It was a ques-
tion of justice, of simple, impartial, and universal
justice. The doom of mankind was toil, and " the
labOurer was worthy of his hire,"—worthy of it un-
diminished by trick, or rapacity, or oppression; wor-
thy of it for what that hire would fetch in the world's
market ; worthy of his hire to lay it out with whom-
soever he pleased, and for whatsoever be pleased;
worthy of it undiminished by any interference what-
ever, except that which took-from him his proportion
of the national expenditure, his proportion of what
was necessary for carrying on the government, and
for the defence of the community.—(Cheers.) All
other matters were but incidental to this. The great
controversy here was this ;. we affirm that the " la-
bourer- is worthy of his hire;" but the monopoly
that levies taxation upon this class for private, and not
for national purposes, in fact denies that proposition,
tramples upon it—spurns it away as if it were a
mere cobweb, and not one of the primary laws of
nature and providence.—(Cheers.) It was one of
the accidents of society, that what the manufacturer
thought the violation of this law, diminished his pro-
fits; it was an accident that the. landlords
thought the violation of this increased his
rents. But if it benefited the manufacturer, and was
injurious to the landlord, the question would be just
the same. They must not regard temporary subjects ;
the consideration here was the recognition of a law,
and the recognition of a title as sacred, aye, more
sacred, than that possessed by any species of property,
or held by any title by which estates were bequeathed
or inherited. In the whole history of mankind lie did
not know of any one class that had .been ruined by
justice, unless it had deserved that ruin by crime.=
(Cheers.) So linked together was the order of things
in nature, that the dictates of equity were never vio-
lated with impunity. Those who had gone upon that
road, should- begin to. look about them and return as
soon as possible. Those who held property, those
who depended on the peace of society for the security
of their possessions, they of . all people should be ten-
der of the rights of the labourer, or their title deeds
would be so much waste parchment. A man's right
in his limbs and strength was beyond and
above any one act of the Legislature. The opera-
tion of human toil was the first of titles, and 'those
who trampled upon it endangered the entire order of
society. They did that which, if carried out, would
break down all safety of property, annihilate all suc-
cession in honours, and even shake thrones to their
very feundations.—(Cheeis.) It was well even for
the enemies of justice—for its violators—that there
was this breakwater between them and the toiling.
multitudes. That they had to deal, in the first in-
stance, with the League, which combined all classes,
and which had for its leaders men of station, of
ability, of wealth, and of extensive influence. That
they had to deal with this combination, and not
merely with the labouring multitudes, disunited from
others, and who, in such a state of society, if left to
themselves in the conflict with the aristocracy,
by whom they had been injured, would only afford
them a prospect of confusion and desolation, who, in
that violence, would plunge into ruin much that was
the best and most ornamental- in the country, and
whose energies would not be capable of being driven
back and cooped up by all the severity or imprison-
ment of any poor-law system which the landed aristo-
cracy could supply. There was zio occasion for him
to attempt going into details, since, at three or four
meetings in succession, they had heard the agricul-
tural part of the question thoroughly entered into,
and at once from members of the landlord class and •
those of the tenant class of agriculturists ; they had
heard statements showing that some among them
knew their own true interest, and saw that honest),
was the best policy, and felt with those who were claim-
ing their rights against the body to which they nomi-
nally belonged. They had here voluntarily proffered
the results of that inquiry which in another place
had been asked for 'And superciliously refused. The
League had held its open Committee, and on this
portion of the subject evidence had been adduced
which might well settle the question, and against
which they found no contradictory evidence from the
antagonist societies. In fact, all the arguments of
what called itself the Agricultural Protection Society
had evaporatedin the production of one tract, chiefly
characterised-by the disgraceful peculiarity of being
the most dishonest publication which had issued from
the press for many a long year.—(Loud cheers.)
There was not a position in it which had not been
over and over again exploded on these boards. It
was false in its logic, false in its history,
false in. its statement of contemporary fact; and
it was, above all, most glaringly and outrageously
false in its attempt to pervert a great authority of
this country, its highest name, the name of the pa-
triarch of political.economy; an attempt to bring
him into court as a witness for the cause of monopoly.
—(Cheers.) An attempt so impudent as that had
never been made before in any cause, however despe-
rate. In the 'face of
,the whole tendency of that
•:vriter's system • in the face of his principles, reite- •
rated in book after hook, and in chapter after chapter,
of his great work.; the Noble Lords and Gentlemen
of the Committee of the AgricUltural Protection
Society had called, not a false witness into court, but
had called Adam Smith, a true witness, putting their
'false words into his mouth.—(Cheers.) This was
beyond the pale of inefe'litefary Offences. Tbm was
not one gentleman connected with the press, either
there or anywhere else, who would .be capable of