Publisher's Synopsis
Excerpt from The Unseen Foundations of Society: An Examination of the Fallacies and Failures of Economic Science Due to Neglected Elements
Make 'a profit. The question of Free Trade In corn was never for a moment entertained by the Cabinet of Lord Grey, and one of my earliest recollec tions is the once-famous saying of his successor, Lord Melbourne, that anyone who contemplated such a measure would be the maddest man in England. 1 This was the phase of thought which held the field when my own interest in political affairs began some fifty-three years ago - and it was the phase of thought which continued to prevail until Cobden began to teach a sounder doctrine. Even his lan guage did not always redeem the controversy from the impression which had long been firmly established by the doctrine of Ricardo, that the contest in favour of free imports of corn was a contest in the interests of manufacturing capitalists alone, to the damage or ruin of agriculture at home, and with no ultimate benefit even to the factory worker. In a most candid passage of a speech quoted by his distinguished bio grapher, Mr. Morley,916 Cobden confessed that most of his party had entered upon'this struggle with the belief that we had some distinct class-interest in the question. On the other hand, Mr. Morley tells us, and I believe with perfect truth, that the question which Cobden and his friends kept constantly asking was - How wages could be kept up, with a popula tion increasing at the rate of a thousand a day? This was an entirely new departure from the line taken by Ricardo, whose very different question always was How can wages be kept down to rates compatible with profits? But this new departure did not come out clearly at first, and even to the last it was constantly.
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