Whether foreign corn should be admitted into this country on payment of fluctuating duties, or a fixed duty, or free of all duties, are obviously questions of the highest importance, involving extensive and complicated considerations.  Sir Robert Peel, Lord John Russell, and the persons banded together under the name of “The Anti-corn-law League,” may be taken as representing the classes of opinion which would respectively answer these three questions in the affirmative.  All of them appealed to the nation at large on the last general election.  The form in which the question was proposed to the country, it fell to the lot of the advocates of a fixed duty to prescribe, and they shaped it thus in the Queen’s speech:—­

“It will be for you to determine whether the corn-laws do not aggravate the natural fluctuations of supply; whether they do not embarrass trade, derange currency, and, by their operation, diminish the comforts and increase the privations of the great body of the community.”

To this question the country returned a deliberate and peremptory answer in the NEGATIVE; expressing thereby its will, that the existing system, which admits foreign corn on payment of fluctuating duties, should continue.  The country thus adopted the opinions of Sir Robert Peel, rejected those of Lord John Russell, and utterly scouted those of the “Anti-corn-law League,” in spite of all their frantic exertions.

We believe that this deliberate decision of the nation, is that to which it will come whenever again appealed to; and is supported by reasons of cogency.  The nation is thoroughly aware of the immense importance of upholding and protecting the agriculture of the country, and that to secure this grand object, it is necessary to admit foreign corn into the country, only when our deficiencies absolutely require it.  That in the operation of the “sliding-scale of duties,” and the exact distinction between its effect and that of the proposed fixed duty, is demonstrably this:  that the former would admit foreign corn in dear years, excluding it in seasons of abundance; while the latter would admit foreign corn in seasons of abundance, and exclude it in dear years.  Our present concern, however, is with the course taken by the present Government.  Have they hitherto yielded to the clamour with which they have been assailed, and departed from the principle of affording efficient protection to the agriculture of the country?  Not a hair’s breadth; nor will they.  We have seen that Sir Robert Peel, previously to the general election, declared his determination to adhere to the existing system of corn-laws, regulating the admission of foreign corn by the power of the sliding-scale of duties; but both he and the leading members of his party, had distinctly stated in Parliament, just before its dissolution, that while resolved to adhere to the principle of a sliding-scale,