On July 2nd, a petition from Glasgow was presented by Earl Fitzwilliam, praying for the repeal of the Corn Law, and his lordship gave it his earnest support. The debate that ensued was in most respects just of the character which had always marked the treatment of a question affecting the profits of that house of corn dealers on the one hand, and the comfortable subsistence of twenty-six millions of people on the other. Some symptoms of fear appeared, if not of repentance, on the part of one or two of the titled monopolists who spoke on the occasion. Apprehensions of short harvests, dear bread, and a probable famine, floated across their brains, and found utterance in some warning prognostications as to the effect of such accidents upon the fate of the question then under discussion. Their lordships were right! A wet July might come. August might find the country with scarcely a month's consumption of corn on hand, and the ports of continental Europe drained for the supply of the United States. We were then entirely dependant on the still ungathered harvest for preservation against greater misery than ever afflicted a civilised community. To the Corn Law it was owing that no sacks of wheat or other grain were filling the granaries of our own capitalists, or awaiting their orders in the stores of Hamburg or Odessa; and if starvation should stalk through the land, every additional death would be attributed to those laws.
But the remarkable feature of the debate was to be found in Lord Melbourne's declaration, that the Government would not take a decided part, till it was certain the majority of the people were in favour of a change. "This," I said, "ought to be a sufficient warning to the masses, that they must depend upon their own exertions, and not trust to the ministry, or the legislature for justice. It is a fair invitation to the people to begin that agitation from without, which whether in reform of Parliament, Catholic Emancipation, or Corn Laws, can alone extricate the
