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EVIDENCE OF OFFICIALS.
opponents of the Corn Laws had protested against a tax of which a small part only found its way into the public revenue, while by much the greater part went into the pockets of a favoured class. Here, then, was a most important inquiry, but it excited little notice at the time. I published in my paper a considerable portion of the evidence, selected for me by Mr. Hume; and even in Manchester, where the bearings of the Corn Law had been carefully studied, few persons took an interest in the investigation. The opening out of this new field is well described in the British Quarterly Review, of May, 1845, from which the following are extracts.:—
"The committee well discharge their task; and in their report and it, presented the country with a body of facts the evidence annexed to it, and opinions of the very highest value to the cause of commercial and industrial freedom. The condemnation of the restrictive system, in all its ramifications, was decisive and complete. Official witnesses, secretaries of the Board of Trade, every way practical men—men possessing means of observation and judgment far superior to those possessed by the leaders of Parliamentary parties—brought their official experience and knowledge to testify to the commercial obstruction, the fiscal exhaustion and embarrassment, the national waste, impoverishment, and suffering inflicted by the various monopolies which we pet and pamper under the name of 'interests,' and to show the vast and unmixed good capable of being realized by national and honest legislation. We regard the evidence given before this committee by Mr. Macgregor, Mr. G. R. Porter, and the late Mr. James Deacon Hume, as constituting one of the most important contributions 'ever made" to the free-trade cause. That such opinions as those expressed by the gentlemen should be the result to which men are led hy years of laborious service in the working department of the Board of Trade, is, to say the least, a most magnificent presumption of the soundness of free-trade principles. Nobody can charge these witnesses with 'theory,' abstraction,' and 'visionary speculation;' and the natural bias of official habit and prejudice would have been in favour of the established system. Yet we find these are the men who are not only the most vigorous and unsparing in their condemnation of the restrictive system, but the boldest in their plans of reform, and the most sanguine and Utopian' in their anticipation of the advantages of every kind—fiscal, commercial, and social—to be reaped by the unreserved and fearless application of the principles of
