Page:History of the Anti corn law league.pdf/257

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MR. CURTIS, OF OHIO.
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been enough to persuade me that I should retract those opinions. But my opinions have always been those good old-fashioned opinions that that government was the best which gave the greatest amount of happiness to the greatest number of its subjects."

At the second day's meeting, which commenced on Wednesday morning before ten o'clock, the chair was taken by the Rev. W. Chaplin, of Bishops Stortford, who called upon Mr. Curtis, a gentleman from Ohio, in the United States, invited by the League to come to this country and aid the movement, who addressed the conference on the advantages which would result from a free and open trade in corn with America. He said it was the most anxious wish of his country, to which he came to give his express testimony, to exchange the food with which their garners were filled, and which Englishmen need to sustain nature, for English manufactures. He gave a glowing description of the power of America to supply wheat, laid down in Liverpool at 47s. a quarter, to an extent equal to all the wants of England. In referring to the question of wages he said: "A most absurd and barefaced fallacy has gained currency, namely, that the high prices of food will bring high prices for labour that there is a correspondence somewhere or other between the prices of food and the wages of labour. In our State of Ohio we know that this is a fallacy. There the wages of an unskilled labouring man are four shillings and sixpence a-day and good wheat is only twenty-seven shillings a quarter, and beef only three-halfpence a pound,and bacon and pork in the same proportion. Now if wages were regulated by the price of food, how came it that wages were higher in the United States than in England and Ireland."

The Rev. Dr. Vaughan, of London, afterwards president of the Lancashire Independent College, moved: "That this conference, drawn together from various parts of the United Kingdom, by a general conviction of the existence