FREE-TRADE MEASURES. The Reform Bill, in its ultimate effects, has crushed the brood whom it warmed into life. Above 200,000 holders of land, in Ireland, have disappeared, or been reduced below the line which qualifies for electors, since 1845. It is now admitted that they were, for the most part, the highest class of cultivators; for the extension of the suffrage is justified on the fearful diminution of their numbers.* So rapid has been their destruction, so fearful the process of deterioration they have undergone, that out of above 900,000 holders of land who are still in Ireland, only 72,000 could be found qualified under the Reform Act; and, to augment the number of these, it is necessary to lower the franchise to £8. Eight pounds a-year is little more than the average maintenance of a pauper in England; and we need not say that the holders of Irish tenements have scarce ever any other source of income. But such is the misery which Free Trade measures have spread in Ireland, that it is there the standard of a freehold qualification. It is in vain to refer to the 40s. freeholders of England as affording a precedent or a parallel to town franchise. Everybody knows that the 40s. freehold originally, when established in the time of Henry VI., a measure of landed property worth £20 or £30 a-year at this time-had come, from the change in the value of money, to be a mere house qualification. No one supposes that the 40s. freeholder lives on his 40s. ; it is the value merely of the cottage garden or paddock which he holds in freehold. He lives on extraneous resources, the wages of labour, realised means, or * From a Parliamentary paper recently published, the decrease in county tenements in Ireland since 1846 has stood thus (April 7, 1850) :: The mere diminution of numbers in the Irish tenements would not, from this Return, if it is to be relied on, appear to be so much as a tenth of the whole. It is the decline in the income of their occupants, from the effect of low prices, which has rendered the changes necessary. The number of holdings and tenements, it is to be observed, is very different from that of occupants,—many tenements being often held by one cottar. the aid of his family. But the £8 tenant in Ireland lives on the subject which qualifies him. In nine cases out of ten, he has no other means of livelihood whatever, and the franchise is the measure of his whole substance. It is little better, in most cases, than the income of an English pauper; but such as it is, we have no doubt it is all that Free-Trade measures will allow the great majority of Irish cultivators to earn; and that, unless the franchise is to dwindle away till the Irish counties in many cases become Gattons and Old Sarums, it is absolutely indispensable to enfranchise such a miserable and destitute class. But we did not expect, amidst all the gloom of our anticipations from the effects of the Reform Bill, and its consequent Free-Trade measures, that this misery and destitution were to reach such a height, that it was to be proclaimed by Lord John Russell himself, and made the ground of the first great breach in his own Constitution! It is not surprising that Government, amidst all the professions of confidence in the national resources, and assertions of general prosperity from Free-Trade measures, should be thus, in their legislative acts, betraying a secret consciousness of the rapid decline of agricultural remuneration, and of the existence of widespread Colonial distress. The prospects of the cultivators, both at home and in the Colonies, are gloomy in the extreme. The price of wheat is now known; it has been judicially fixed, at least in Scotland. The fiar prices in that country are, on an average, £1, 16s. for wheat, and 14s. for oats; instead of 51s. for the former, and 24s. for the latter, which they were three years ago, before the Irish famine set in. Good wheat is selling at this moment, in the Haddington market, at £1, 13s. 6d. a quarter-lower than it has been for a hundred and fifty years. In the face of all this, importation of foreign grain is undergoing no diminution; and with prices at 38s. a quarter, above nine-tenths of the supply of the metropolis is derived from foreign parts.* Black cattle * Take, for example, the Return for the week ending May 4, 1850:- English, Oats. 750 1,020 Malt. -Times, May 4. have fallen in the proportion of ten to six, or forty per cent; and although the rents of sheep-farms have as yet, from the high prices of wool, not been materially affected, yet it is well known that they too will ere long share in the general decline. Rents are in most parts of Ireland irrecoverable the misery in many of its Unions equals that of the worst period of the famine. Rents in Scotland will, at next term-day, be postponed: the tenants, acknowledging their inability to pay, generally are already asking for time; and it is well understood on both sides, that if the present low prices continue, the arrears, now fast accumulating, will become irrecoverable. On England it is unnecessary to dwell it has spoken out in a voice which can neither be mistaken, nor pretended to be unheard. But why go into details to illustrate a fact which, so far from being denied, is openly admitted, and even gloried in by the Free-Traders? In a late paper on Free Trade, we estimated the decline in the value of agricultural produce, in the British islands, in consequence of free trade in grain, at £75,000,000, or a fourth of its amount. But the Freetraders tell us, and apparently with reason, that this is too low an estimate. Mr Villiers, in seconding the Address in the House of Commons, calculated the saving of the people, in the consumption of all the kinds of food, since 1847, at £91,000,000; and if to this is added the price of the 12,000,000 quarters of all sorts of grain, which were imported in the course of 1849, estimated at the moderate average of 20s. a quarter, the loss to the agricultural interest will be £103,000,000. But this is evidently too high, as the prices of 1847 were scarcity prices, owing to the famine in Ireland; and deducting £13,000,000 on that account, there will remain £90,000,000 at the very least which has been lost in one year to the agricultural interest of Great Britain and Ireland. This is more than a third of its amount, which may be taken, under the reduced scale of prices, for three years prior to the Irish famine, at £250,000,000 annual value. But this, it is said, is all a landlords' question: the community at large, and, above all, the borough electors who rule the empire, have no interest in it. A landlord's question truly! Why, the whole land rents of the two islands, abstracting from them those of houses, are under £60,000,000 annually; and a loss of £90,000,000 a-year is a landlords' question only! It is, at least, as much a tenants' question as a landlords'; and as there are now 750,000 holders of land in the two islands of Great Britain and Ireland, amounting with their families to 2,500,000 souls, this body, one and all of whom have been impoverished by the change, must be taken as a clear addition to the landlords, who have been directly and deeply injured by the same causes. And what are we to say to the agricultural labourers, mechanics, millers, wheelwrights, and artificers, who depend directly, immediately, and almost entirely, on the market for the produce of their industry among the rural population? At the very least, their incomes would all decline a half, and they, with their families, amount to some millions more. And this is what the Free-Traders call a landlords' question ! We But, in truth, we deprecate, and that in the most earnest manner, all these calculations of class loss or suffering, so far as they proceed on the idea that it is possible for one class to suffer without every other speedily doing the same. Such arguments and topics were never heard of in Great Britain till the Reform Bill gave one class in society, viz. the urban shopkeepers, the command of the British Empire. acknowledge one only interest in the whole community, and that is the interest of all classes; we acknowledge one only family that is, the whole British people. Their real interests are, and ever must be, the same. It is impossible, in one community, that one great interest can be suffering while others are thriving. Such a thing might happen for a time, when the manufacturing interest was prosperous from a sudden extension of the export sale in some considerable foreign markets; but such a gleam of sunshine must be temporary only, if not accompanied by a simultaneous growth in the great and only durable issue for goods-the home market. The whole manufactures exported at present-one Apart, in the three kingdoms, from rents of houses, which amount to about £15,000,000 more. of the most prosperous years, so far as the export sale goes -are about £60,000,000 a-year. The manufactures taken off by the home market are estimated, by the most experienced authorities, at £120,000,000. Of the £60,000,000 exported, about £16,000,000 goes to our own Colonies, so that the home and colonial market takes off yearly £136,000,000; all foreign markets put together, £44,000,000. In other words, the home and colonial market is more than three times all foreign markets put together. How is it possible after this to deny that a serious and lasting blow, struck at the rural producing interests in the British islands and Colonies, must ere long react, and that too with terrible effect, on the prosperity of our manufacturers? Mr Villiers boasts that Free Trade has cut £91,000,000 off the remuneration of the British farmers. Is it not evident that, assuming this to be true, the greater part of this sum is cut off the funds which pay in the home market? and if so, how long will our £120,000,000 consumed in the home market be in sinking to £80,000,000, or some still lower figure? And will Manchester and Glasgow be much benefited, if they gain £10,000,000 or £12,000,000 annually in the foreign market, and lose £40,000,000 or £50,000,000 in the home? Already it has become painfully evident that this effect is taking place in this country. Ministers boast of the exports having increased above £10,000,000 in 1849 over what they were in 1848, and of their having now turned £60,000,000 a-year. Let it be supposed that this is all to be put down to the account of Free Trade, and that our Indian victories, the pacification of Europe, the crushing of revolution in France, and the impulse given to American purchase by Californian gold, had nothing at all to do with the matter. Is the country prosperous ?—are the railways prosperous ?are poor-rates declining ?-is labour in request either in the rural or urban districts? The facts are notoriously the reverse. At this moment above ten thousand looms in Manchester are preparing to put their mills upon the short time of forty hours a-week. The railways never were so low at an average, their stock is worth little more than a third of what it was three years ago. Much |