Page:Six lectures on the corn-law monopoly and free trade.djvu/28

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18
LECTURE I.

culled out of the columns of the Anti-Bread-Tax Circular; driving the monopoly cabinet, with all its thundering majority, into concessions and mutations which, though settling nothing well, have the next best merit of well unsettling every thing:—and on it rolls still—mighty, majestic, resistless—the swelling tide of reason and of right—a nation's demand for justice, a nation's prayer to the great God of justice, "Give us—oh! give us our daily bread."

England—says Shakspeare's old John of Gaunt, breathing his last in prophetic denunciation of reckless and selfish misgovernment, which—

……"Insatiate cormorant,
Consuming means, soon preys upon itself"—

England —

……"This land of such dear souls,
Dear for her reputation through the world.
Is now leas'd out
Like to a tenement, or pelting farm:
England, hound in with the triumphant sea,
Whose rocky shore beats back the envious siege
Of wat'ry Neptune, is now bound in with shame,
With inky blots, and rotten parchment bonds."

Please God, we'll wipe the inky blots clean, and rend the rotten parchment bonds.