If the signs can be trusted, there seems to approach
a real re- vival of trade, under the stimulus of speculation for the newly- opened Chinese markets. The price of cotton was the first thing to rise ; then the price of goods made from cotton and meant for China ; then the freights in the ships to carry the goods ; and a variety of trades directly or indirectly interested feel the impulse. Should the promised renewal of industry actually ensue, the im- mediate effect would be a considerable mitigation of the distress, or perhaps the termination of this fit of it. How might the respite be employed ? Sir ROBERT PEEL, lecturing on political economy in elucidation of his Tariff and Corn-law, had a number of willing pupils, who would have learned of no other master ; and he, as well as the Anti-Corn-law League, has in turn sent a band of lecturers about the country to diffuse information on the impolicy of our restrictive system. It is true that the two sets of lecturers differ very con- siderably in the extent to which they go ; but there are also the compensating differences between them—that whereas the League's lecturers are persons of no influence and are received with hostile suspicion, PEEL'S lecturers have much influence, each in his own neighbourhood, and have auditories prepared to assent. Mr. Con- DEN sneered at the speeches of these gentlemen at agricultural dinners—their assurances that a relaxation of our restrictive policy is not so very dangerous, and their exhortations to farmers to de- pend less on "protection" and more on intelligent exertion. The views of the new converts are accounted cheap. But how were they received ? They were seldom called in question by their agricultural hearers ; we do not observe that they were ever gain- said; and it appears that they were generally, often warmly, ap- plauded. The cheaply-accounted converts were the medium for
infusing a better spirit into the agricultural community ; and the demeanour of their hearers proved that the spirit was caught. Should the promise bold good, then, there will for a time be a diminished pressure of that distress by which the late measures were occasioned ; and one of their best effects will have been, to awaken a new spirit of independent energy among agriculturists. In the immediate future such measures will be at once neither so urgent nor so difficult. A wise statesman would use the interval of relaxed pressure to proceed with further improvements of our economical system, more quietly and deliberately than it was pos- sible to do under actual pressure ; so that by the time the next period of difficulty comes round, the reproach will be removed that nothing is done to better the condition of the people except in ex- treme emergencies. It is the opprobrium of the Whigs, that ten years of lengthened opportunity were neglected, and that financial reform was only adopted at the eleventh hour as a pretext, to save the party from rout ; and so, when the pressure set in that direction, the financial reforms had to be executed all in a hurry : the lesson should not be lost.
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