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lation, by aiding the procreative propensity of man in furnishing to him comforts and the means of purchasing provisions. As the men increase, the demand for produce of land again increases; and thus more land, and land of a still inferior degree of richness, is cultivated; and thus a country keeps increasing in wealth and numbers. This is the wholesome and happy state of society; and in this way every state will continue increasing if it be well governed. When manufactures for foreigners and foreign trade are added, an additional stimulus is of course given to the powers or propensities above named, and the national prosperity is accelerated: but surely he must be a most unwise politician who would sacrifice the home to the foreign trade. If the foreign trade can be carried on without the destruction of the domestic, it is very desirable that it should be encouraged, but not otherwise: if foreign trade cannot be carried on, and manufactures continued, without destroying the capital and people employed in the culture of the lands already reclaimed, it is surely better that it should stop or cease. As a matter of profit it might be shown to be better, as well as a matter of policy. In the present state of society, it is absurd to expect that enlightened nations, who can procure our machinery, will long buy of us our manufactures; they will manufacture, of course, for them. selves : if their taxes are lower, for this reason, their wages will be lower; and if they be not quite so skilful, or have, by the want of paper money or for any other cause, not so great a command of capital, they will at first, for the sake of securing both the farmer's and the manufacturer's profit, do what we did at first: they will secure their infant manufactures by restrictions on foreign import till they can go by themselves, as we did with our silk trade. With unenlightened countries, like China or its neighboring islands,-or with new countries where there is no coal,-we may hope to continue our trade; our machinery may perhaps enable us to undersell even the cheap laborers of the former, or the high rate of profit in the agriculture of the latter.

30. It is unnecessary to say any thing in answer to the speculative theory of open ports producing equality of prices; as I have shown, in my pamphlet above alluded to, that it is unfounded in fact, from the returns of the open port of Rotterdam, as given in the Westminster Review, where it appears that the prices have varied more than ever they have done in England.

31. Much has been said about corn being at an unnatural and artificial price. I will just state what the natural state of a country is. When the land of a country is appropriated, and the population increases, poorer and less eligible lands are brought into cultivation for the use of the increasing population. If in the adjoining country over the boundary there be better or more eligible land,— if there be perfect liberty, population will go to it, and it will be

cultivated before the less eligible lands of the former country; and thus the countries of richer land and finer climate, or better government, will infallibly beat the other. Belgium will beat Norway. But if the first, by protecting laws or better government, encourage its people to cultivate its own soil, it will improve without any regard to the other. Now this is what England has done, and thus has left its neighbors behind it; and this is the natural state of things. The project of the economist, to abolish all restriction, would not be to raise our neighbor up to an equality with us, but to pull us down (by ruining our manufactures-a consequence of ruining our agriculture and all its dependent towns and trades,) to the level of our unfortunate neighbors, who have been kept in misery and poverty by their wretched governments, even in spite of better soil and better climates.

32. At the present moment, from a variety of causes, our manufacturing population is vastly too large; it is more numerous than can be employed on manufactures, or, in our present state, by our agriculture. It is evidently therefore the wisest thing to employ then to cultivate our wastes, to raise food for themselves and their brother manufacturers, as well as by this means to open a market for the work of the latter. If the Corn Law was instantly abolished, our home market would not only be ruined, but it would hasten the glut which our immense machinery must create in a very few years, even if we have the whole world to work for. But on the principles of the economists, it follows, that with our immense annuity, to pay by taxes, operating to sterilise our soils, as much more of our poor lands must be laid waste than our neighbors, as our taxes are greater than theirs, supposing our climate and every thing else to be on an equality with them. GODFREY HIGGINS.

Skellow Grange, near Doncaster,

October 12, 1826.

P. S. Since the above was written, a new argument has been advanced by Mr. Hunt, at the meeting of the Common Hall of the City. He maintained, that foreign corn, &c. cannot be brought into England except it be paid for, directly or indirectly, by the landed produce of England. This is a great mistake. It will be paid for ; partly by cutlery made from Swedish iron-partly by calico made of Egyptian and American cotton-partly by Spitalfields goods made of Chinese and Italian silkpartly by cloth made of Saxony and Odessa wool,--and by many other manufactured articles of foreign growth in the same way.

All these goods will be carried in Baltic and American shipping. The makers will be fed on Polish corn,-on oil-fed beef and mutton,-on butter, eggs, poultry, &c. brought in steam boats from Belgium,-and they will wear clothes made of the foreign articles enumerated above.

The manufacturer solely for foreigners and the public annuitant will be benefited by the free trade in corn; every other interest in England will be ruined, except the ship owners and the growers of short wool. They will not be ruined by this measure, because Mr. Huskisson's insane theories have ruined them already.

1 Nov. 1826.

JOINT-STOCK COMPANIES.

[The following Speeches are reprinted as a record of the impression made by the late mania for Joint-Stock Companies.]

House of Commons, November 21, 1826.

MR. ALDERMAN WAITHMAN said, that the spirit of gambling and speculation which prevailed during the last year, had filled the Gazette with more bankruptcies than any other cause. The bubbles in 1720 had often been referred to as forming a parallel to those which had recently exploded; but he contended that the parallel was by no means a just one, as there had been a loss upon one scheme alone in the last year, which was more than equal to all the losses put together upon all the schemes which were devised in 1720. No measures, however, had been taken at present, to punish the fraudulent projectors of these ruinous schemes. In the year 1720, a proclamation was issued by the crown, and subsequently a bill was passed by Parliament, for the punishment of those who had offended, and for the prevention of such offences in future. In the address agreed to on that occasion, the house expressly pledged itself to apply its most strenuous efforts, with firmness and resolution, to discover and redress those manifold grievances. A vote was then passed by that house, declaring that it would not only inquire into those great public nuisances, but also that it would devise proper means for the due punishment of their authors and abettors. He said this, because he thought the house ought, in the present instance, to feel it to be a duty imperatively imposed on it to institute a similar inquiry; and if such an inquiry were directed, he believed that he could produce such evidence of the enormity of many of these speculations, of the ill effects which had flowed from them throughout the country,-of the gambling, the loss, and the ruin, to which they had given rise, as would induce the house to take some decisive steps with respect to those who had projected and supported them. This, he was sure, he would be enabled to do, if the house thought proper to investigate the subject. He was

VOL. XXVII.

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NO. LIII.

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sorry to say, that in touching on this question he felt a great deal of difficulty. And why? Because the names of many honorable members of that house-the names of several gentlemen who had been long esteemed and respected-were mixed up with some of those transactions. But, however blameable they might be for want of foresight, however blameable they might be for rashly lending their names to such speculations, he hoped they would be enabled to get rid of any charge connected with fraud and trickery by which some of these schemes were characterised. And here he felt it right to declare, with respect to one individual, an hon. member of that house (Mr. Brogden), that if it were proposed again to place him in the situation which he had recently held, he, for one, would call on him for a full and satisfactory explanation of his conduct with respect to some of the transactions to which he had alluded, before he would give that hon. gentleman his vote for again performing the duties of that situation.

Mr. BROGDEN immediately rose, but, from the buz which pervaded the house, his earliest observations were not perfectly audible in the gallery. As the hon. alderman had so pointedly alluded to him, he felt it necessary to say, he had unfortunately become connected with some of those speculations to which the hon. alderman had referred-speculations which, he conceived, had grown out of the excessive circulation of the country, and the low rate of interest. Some of these, he believed, were of a beneficial nature, and some, he thought, were connected with circumstances of a nefarious description. With one of the latter kind, (we presume the Arigna Mining Company), he was undoubtedly connectedbut it should not be forgotten that he was not the projector of that plan. He was induced to join it by the representations of one in whose integrity he placed the highest confidence. This fact he was prepared to prove. When complaints were made as to certain proceedings of the company, he, as one of the directors, consulted with the rest as to the course to be pursued. The consequence was, that a committee was immediately appointed-a committee of active and intelligent persons, who well understood the questions that were to be resolved-for the purpose of investigating all the facts. The points brought forward were examined most strictly, and the result was, that he (Mr. Brogden) received from that committee the most positive testimony of his innocence. The proceedings of that committee were laid before a general meeting; and by that general meeting the report of the committee was unanimously confirmed. There was, subsequently, another meeting called, for the purpose of removing those directors who appeared to have been concerned in the objectionable part of this transaction; and the result of that meeting was, to confirm,

almost unanimously, the former proceedings with respect to him. He said almost unanimously, because some few individuals opposed à resolution which exculpated him, while it inculpated those who held up their hands against it. The obnoxious directors were removed accordingly, there being a minority of only seven persons against the general resolution to which he had referred. It was afterwards found that there was some irregularity in this proceeding, which, it was supposed, might occasion it to be set aside; and another general meeting was therefore convened. At that meeting, he (Mr. Brogden) was the object of much, and he must say, of undeserved obloquy; but still the result of this last meeting was, to give full effect to the former resolution. The directors whose conduct was impugned were rejected-others were appointed in their room; and he (Mr. Brogden) was placed in the chair of that company. The proceedings had given him so much dis gust, had so harassed his mind, and wounded his feelings, that it was much against his will that he undertook the situation. He did so, however, in justice to his own character, because he wished. to prove to the world that he possessed that confidence which ever belonged to innocence. With respect to the company itself, he must say that it was not a bugbear. He never viewed it as such. There was a rage at the time for companies, and undoubtedly he might have experienced something of the prevalent feeling. He had been engaged in several of those companies; and, he would say, that with one or two exceptions (that of the Strand-bridge, for instance), they had all been beneficial, not only to the public, but to the proprietors. With respect to the Strand bridge, it should be observed, that he was not an original projector of that speculation. He came into it several years after it was instituted, and any loss connected with it was in no degree attributable to him. He spoke warmly on this subject, because he could not but feeland it would be ridiculous in him if he pretended not to be aware of the fact that on the first day of the session, a plain allusion was made to him by a gallant officer (Sir Joseph Yorke). He regretted the way in which that honorable and gallant officer, while remarking on the compliments which had been paid to the Speaker, had thought proper to allude to him (Mr. Brogden). That hon. and gallant member had been, as well as himself, a member of that house for many years, and from the intercourse of civility which had taken place between them, he was rather unprepared for such an observation. He (Mr. Brogden) was not hypocritical enough to say that he joined the speculations that had been referred to without indulging any hope of deriving benefit from them; but he could most sincerely declare that he never was influ enced by any base or improper feeling. He had belonged to the

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