Page:History of the Anti corn law league - Volume 2.pdf/392

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378
THE FARMERS JOURNAL.

words by any remarks of ours; we trust they will vibrate loud and long in the ears of our readers."

The Farmers' Journal equally despairing, after a seem ingly hopeless appeal to the members of the Agricultural Protection Society, to exert themselves at the next election, said: "If this be not done, one hope, and one hope only, will remain to the English tiller of the soil. A perfectly free trade in corn, ruinous as it must prove in the first instance, will either wipe off the national debt, and all its necessary train of direct or indirect taxation, or, after a time, compel & return to a scale of duties amply protective of native industry in all its branches; and, things considered, if we are doomed to see the principles now adopted by ministers ultimately and fully carried into action, perhaps the sooner the better ought to be the cry of all concerned." These predictions did not lower the price of consols.