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IMPOSSIBLE TO FIX PRICES.
from the opposition.) I thank the right honourable baronet for his avowal. Perhaps then he will oblige us by trying to do so. Supposing, however, that he will make the attempt, I ask the right honourable gentleman, and I again pause for a reply,—will he try to legislate so as to keep up the price of cotton, silk, and wool ? No reply. Then we come to this conclusion, that we are not legislating for the universal people. (Tremendous cheers.) If the agriculturists are to have the benefit of a law founded on the calculation of a ten years' average, to keep up their price at that average, I ask, are the manufacturers to have it too? (Hear, hear.) Take the ironmongers of the midland counties—the manufacturers of the very articles the agriculturists consume. Their goods have been depreciated thirty per cent, in the last ten years. Are they continue to exchange their commodities for the corn of the landlord, who has the benefit of a law keeping up his price on a calculation of a ten years' average, without the iron manufacturer having the benefit of the same consideration? (Hear, hear.) I ask the right honourable baronet, whether, while he fixes his scale of prices to secure to the landowners 56s. a quarter, he has a sliding scale for wages? (Cheers.) I know but of one class of labourers in this country whose interests are well secured by the sliding scale of corn duties, and that class is the clergy of the Established Church, whose tithes are calculated upon the averages. But I want to know what you will do with the hard-working classes of the community—the labouring artizans—if the price of bread is to be kept up by act of Parliament. Will you give them a law to keep up the rate of their wages? You will say that you have passed resolutions that you cannot keep up the rate of wages; but that is no reason you should pass a law to mulct the working man one–third of the loaf he earns. What are the pretexts upon which the corn tax is justified? We have heard in the first place, that there are exclusive burdens borne by the agriculturists. I heard one explanation given of those burdens by a witty gentleman who sits near me. He said that the only exclusive burden upon land which he knew of were mortgages. (Laughter.) I think the country has a right to know, and indeed I think it would have been no more than is due to this house, if those burdens, of which we have heard so much, had been named and enumerated. The answer I heard from the right honourable gentleman opposite was, that there was a great variety of opinions regarding these burdens. That I could myself have told the right honourable gentleman. As a law is to be framed and founded expressly upon these burdens, it would have been fair at least to tell us what they are. I shall not enter upon the subject now, but this I will tell the right hon. gentleman, that for every particular burden he can show me pressing upon the land, I will show him ten exemptions. (Hear, hear.) Yes,
