My Manifesto: The Incoherent Ramblings of a Madman

Free Trade is still on the agenda - it was on the agenda a century ago!

Marx

This is what they said to the factory workers:

"The duty levied on corn is a tax upon wages; this tax you pay to
the landlords, those medieval aristocrats; if your position is
wretched one, it is on account of the dearness of the immediate
necessities of life."

The workers in turn asked the manufacturers:

"How is it that in the course of the last 30 years, while our
industry has undergone the greatest development, our wages have
fallen far more rapidly, in proportion, than the price of corn has
gone up?

"The tax which you say we pay the landlords is about 3 pence a week
per worker. And yet the wages of the hand-loom weaver fell,
between 1815 and 1843, from 28s. per week to 5s., and the wages of
the power-loom weavers, between 1823 and 1843, from 20s. per week
to 8s.

"And during the whole of this period that portion of the tax which
we paid to the landlord has never exceeded 3 pence. And, then in
the year 1834, when bread was very cheap and business going on very
well, what did you tell us? You said, 'If you are unfortunate, it
is because you have too many children, and your marriages are more
productive than your labor!'

"These are the very words you spoke to us, and you set about making
new Poor Laws, and building work-houses, the Bastilles of the
proletariat."

To this the manufacturer replied:

"You are right, worthy laborers; it is not the price of corn alone,
but competition of the hands among themselves as well, which
determined wages.

"But ponder well one thing, namely, that our soil consists only of
rocks and sandbanks. You surely do not imagine that corn can be
grown in flower-pots. So if, instead of lavishing our capital and
our labor upon a thoroughly sterile soil, we were to give up
agriculture, and devote ourselves exclusively to industry, all
Europe would abandon its factories, and England would form one huge
factory town, with the whole of the rest of Europe for its
countryside."

While thus haranguing his own workingmen, the manufacturer is
interrogated by the small trader, who says to him:

"If we repeal the Corn Laws, we shall indeed ruin agriculture; but
for all that, we shall not compel other nations to give up their
own factories and buy from ours.

"What will the consequence be? I shall lose the customers that I
have at present in the country, and the home trade will lose its
market."

The manufacturer, turning his back upon the workers, replies to the
shopkeeper:

"As to that, you leave it to us! Once rid of the duty on corn, we
shall import cheaper corn from abroad. Then we shall reduce wages
at the very time when they rise in the countries where we get out
corn.

"Thus in addition to the advantages which we already enjoy we shall
also have that of lower wages and, with all these advantage, we
shall easily force the Continent to buy from us."

But now the farmers and agricultural laborers join in the discussion.

"And what, pray, is to become of us?

"Are we going to pass a sentence of death upon agriculture, from
which we get our living? Are we to allow the soil to be torn from
beneath our feet?"