mn] UONDITION OF THE RUBAL POOR. 15%

Sixpence ; rent, eighteen pence; leaving, out of the total
8arnings of seven shillings, a balance of sixpence, out
of which to provide the family with clothing, potatoes,
0d all the other necessaries and luxuries of human
existence,
With facts like these before them, the leaguers read with
tockery the idyllic fastian in which even the ablest men
of the landlord party complacently indulged their feeling
for the picturesque. Sir James Graham, in resisting Mr.
Villiers’s motion this year, spoke of the breezy call of
incense-breathing morn, the neat thatched cottage, the
blooming garden, the cheerful village green. The repeal of
the corn laws would lead to a great migration from all this
loveliness to the noisy alley, and the “sad sound of the
factory bell” «Tell not to me any more,” the orator
called out in a foolish ecstasy, “of the cruelfies of the con-Veyance
 of the Poles to the wintry wastes of Siberia; talk
not to me of the transportation of the Hill Coolies from
Coromandel to the Mauritius ; a change is contemplating by
Some members of this House, far more cruel, far more heartvending
 in the bosom of our native land.” * If this nonsense
Was the vein of so able a man as Graham, we may infer the
depths of prejudice and fallacy down into which Cobden
and his allies had to follow less sensible people. And the
struggle had hardly begun. The landlords were not yet
Awakened into consciousness that this time the Manchester
wen were in earnest, and resolutely intended to raise the
tountry upon them. They still believed that the corn laws
Were as safe as the monarchy ; and many months passed
before they realized that the little group who now met
Reveral times in each week in a dingy room on an upper
Boor at Newall’s Buildings in Market Street in Manchester,
Were not to be daunted either by bad divisions in Parliament,
March 15 1820.

1839.

Zr. 35.