Various
Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 66, No. 410, December 1849
But let the Free-traders be of good cheer – they have done marvellous things. They have accomplished what no British statesmen, since the days of Alfred, have been able to effect. They have stopped the growth of our population, and, for the first time for four centuries, rendered it retrograde. They have sent from two hundred and fifty to three hundred thousand people yearly out of the country, for three years, in search of food. They have lowered the Irish circulation of notes a half. They have, with one blow, swamped the Poor-law Amendment Act in England, and rendered rates higher, even with prices extremely low, than they ever were in English history. They have extirpated 200,000 cultivators in Ireland. They have cut £80,000,000 a-year off from the remuneration of cultivation and the encouragement of the home market to our manufactures in Great Britain. They have lowered railway property more than a half. They have destroyed, at least, a half of the whole commercial and trading wealth of the manufacturing towns. They have made the nation dependant, in two years, for a fourth of its subsistence on foreign states. They have rendered the maintenance of the national independence, if the present system is persisted in, impossible. They have destroyed £100,000,000 worth of property in the West Indies. They have sown the seeds of revolt in Canada, and rendered its separation, at no distant period, from Great Britain a matter of certainty. They have repealed the Navigation Laws, and thereby cut off the right arm of our naval strength. They are fast laying the seeds of dismemberment in our colonial empire. They will soon reduce, if unchecked in their career, the immense empire of England to two islands, oppressed with taxes, eaten up by paupers, importing a third of their annual subsistence from foreign states, brought in in foreign bottoms. These are the effects of FREE TRADE AT ITS ZENITH. What will they be at its Nadir?