permitting their own countrymen to die of starvation, now gave a fresh instance of their heartless selfishness, by voting that Englishmen should not have cheap bread, because Irish landowners had corn to sell. On division, the numbers were:–For the motion, 155; against it, 313.
If the merchants and manufacturers placed too much on reliance parliamentary action without outward pressure, the working classes misdirected their aim. They were wasting their energies in the formation of trades' unions, and in obviously hopeless contests with their employers—alike sufferers by impolite restrictions on trade. Ebenezer Elliott, in an address to the people of England, published in Tait's Magazine, called on those classes to awaken from their slumbers, and told them:—"The Corn Laws have placed you on the verge of a volcano. If your rivals establish a system of free trade before you, you are gone for ever as a manufacturing people, and nothing will then remain for you but potatoes; nothing for your oppressors but potatoes and salt." The hard-smiting writer thus concluded his appeal:—"How many more sessions of your reform Parliament can you afford to throw away? Think not, then, of his Majesty's renegade ministers. False to themselves, can they be true to you? Trust them? What! have they not told you that your trade was never more flourishing than at present? Yes, there is one branch of your trade which does indeed flourish; I mean the manufacture of customers into rivals! Yes, and if the Corn Laws continue but a little longer, the trade of your rivals—planted, nurtured, and matured by the madness of the landed supporters of a suicidal administration—will continue to flourish and blossom, and bear fruit, over the grave of British prosperity! Haste, then, and destroy these deadly Corn Laws, ere they subvert the empire. Let every trade, from every town, one by one, and again, and again, send petitions to Parliament. Let brave and enlightened Glasgow speak again to timid and
