the truck system, to establish Co-operative Societies, and Regeneration Societies, to shorten the hours of labour, to bolster up the wages of some particular class of workmen by unions, to fill the country with a cry against the New Poor Law—and all this with a staff of paid treasurers, paid collectors, paid secretaries, paid itinerant orators, and paid newspapers, while, during all the time, the Corn Laws are grinding down the reward of their labour on the one hand, and raising the price of their food on the other;—let them think of all these things, and reflect in what a different position they would have stood now, had there been, throughout all these years, one combined and energetic effort against the landowners monopoly, which has been all the while closing market after market against us, and intercepting the food which a beneficent Providence has produced in abundance for all the people that dwell upon the face of the earth. England might have been a garden in all its length and breadth, had the energies of its people been employed in the right direction. But we blame not the industrious classes alone. The half starved and uninstructed hand-loom weaver has an excuse in the supineness of the Manchester Chamber of Commerce, which, for seven years, has not made a single movement against the monopoly which is destroying that trade, the protection of which is the declared object of the association! Gladly should we see the merchants and manufacturers rouse themselves from their apathetic sleep ere their trade be transferred to France, to Switzerland, and Belgium, and the United States—nay, and even to the semi-barbarous Russia. And gladly should we see a contemporaneous delivery of the working classes from their false teachers. We really believe the poor will be right first. Already O'Connor murmers at the apathy of the working classes; Oastler courts imprisonment as the best means of giving an impulse to his doctrines; already does Stephens counsel a cessation of public exhibitions."
