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if the law did protect you, (which it never did and never will,) what guarantee have you that the political landowners will not come to an agreement again in London next session, as they did in the last, with Sir Robert Peel, and consent to another alteration? Depend upon it, there is no chance of your coming to a satisfactory adjustment of rents and leases, so long as you allow the intervention of politics in your bargains with the landowners. Politics may be a winning game to those who have their own arrangements to make with the minister of the day, but I pity the case of the farmer who reckons any Corn Law for the value of a farthing, in making a bargain for his farm with his landlord. So long as the owners of your farms can point to a law, as a reason for obtaining a certain price for their produce, you will in no case be able to make a safe agreement for the use of their land. Get rid of all such interferences with your dealings at once. Let the Corn Laws be totally and immediately repealed, and then every tenant throughout the kingdom will at once be brought on fair terms to a settlement with his landlord. Public opinion and the necessities of the case will then force an equitable adjustment of rents and leases; and the dealings between landlord and tenant will thenceforth settle down into mere matters of business, with which politics will no longer interfere.
I now address myself to you—the farm labourers, for it is unblushingly declared that it is on your account, too, that we enjoy a Corn Bill. If you have attended to the preceding remarks, you will have observed what I think I have satisfactorily established, that, though the Bread Tax was abolished to-morrow, we should still possess the fertile soil of Britain, and that ploughing, sowing, and harrowing would go on much as usual. It has been said that, with low-priced food, a reduction in wages would immediately follow, but we see high-priced grain in Ireland, and wages from 8d. to 1s. a day, while the same quantity of labour, in America, with low-priced food, would earn a dollar, or 4s. 2d.; so that it must be an undoubted proposition that the wages of labour, like everything else, depend upon the supply and the demand. The only real connection between wages and the price of food is, simply, that the labourer's wages must be sufficient at least to keep soul and body together, while all past history proves that abundant seasons, or a plentiful supply of food, tend to raise both the real and nominal wages of labour. When the means of living is cheap, many labourers are tempted to leave their masters and become independent workmen. A large number of farm servants throughout the kingdom lodge and board with their masters, their board and lodging being usually esteemed equivalent to about half their wages; so that, when
