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Facts for Labourers.

Taxing Foreign Wheat.

Protectionists and Fair Traders want to impose a tax on the importation of wheat.

They pretend that this would be for the interests of Agriculture, while the rest of the Community would not be injured.

There is only one class which would be benefited, and that is the Landlords, who would be able to exact higher rents.

Every other class would be robbed.

Farmers would not gain; their rents would be raised.

Labourers would not gain; they would have to pay more for their loaf and for everything else they use, and their wages would be lowered.

Trade would languish and the whole Community would suffer.

The nation has had a bitter experience of all this.

In 1815, in order to keep up war prices, and so keep up rents for the Landlords, a Corn Law was enacted.

Foreign wheat was not to be imported free until the price was 80s. a quarter, which meant is for the four-pound loaf.

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In Accrington, out of a population of 9,000, only 100 were fully employed.

The reports of the factory inspectors showed that 10 per cent, of the cotton mills, and 12 per cent, of the woollen mills of Lancashire and Yorkshire, were standing idle; and that of the rest only one-fourth were working full time. As Cobden showed, in answer to Sir Robert Peel, the stocking frames of Nottingham were as idle as the looms of Stockport; the glass-cutters of Stourbridge, and the glovers of Yeovil, were undergoing the same privations as the potters of Stoke and the miners of Staffordshire, where 25,000 men were destitute of employment. He knew of a place where one hundred wedding-rings were pawned in a single week to provide bread, and of another place where men and women subsisted on boiled nettles, and dug up the decayed carcass of a cow rather than perish of hunger.

Such was the state of things which existed under a system which was called Protection.

In those days the population of Great Britain was about 15 millions; it is now over 30 millions.

In 1884, under Free Trade, there is not a man, woman, or child, who is not better off than he or she would have been under the old starvation laws.

Labourers get higher wages than they did under these laws, and with the same money they command more of the necessaries and conveniences of life than they could then.

With these Facts before them they will not listen to those who, under pretence of protecting their interests, would induce them to vote for putting a duty on foreign wheat, that is, levying a Bread Tax.