“The continental people, it would seem, are ’exporting our machinery, beginning to spin cotton, and manufacture for themselves, to cut us out of this market and then out of that!’ Sad news, indeed, but irremediable—­by no means the saddest news.  The saddest news is, that we should find our national existence, as I sometimes hear it said, depend on selling manufactured cotton at a farthing an ell cheaper than any other people—­a most narrow stand for a great nation to base itself on; a stand which, with all the corn-law abrogations conceivable, I do not think will be capable of enduring.

“My friends, suppose we quitted that stand; suppose we came honestly down from it, and said—­’This is our minimum of cotton prices; we care not, for the present, to make cotton any cheaper.  Do you, if it seems so blessed to you, make cotton cheaper.  Fill your lungs with cotton fug, your hearts with copperas fumes, with rage and mutiny; become ye the general gnomes of Europe, slaves of the lamp!’ I admire a nation which fancies it will die if it do not undersell all other nations to the end of the world.  Brothers, we will cease to undersell them; we will be content to equalsell them:  to be happy selling equally with them.  I do not see the use of underselling them; cotton cloth is already twopence a yard or lower, and yet bare backs were never more numerous amongst us.  Let inventive men cease to spend their existence incessantly contriving how cotton can be made cheaper; and try to invent, a little, how cotton, at its present cheapness, could be somewhat juster divided amongst us!  Let inventive men consider whether the secret of this universe, and of man’s life there, does after all, as we rashly fancy it, consist in making money?  There is one God—­just, supreme, almighty:  but is Mammon the name of him?

“But what is to be done with our manufacturing population, with our agricultural, with our ever-increasing population?—­cry many.—­Ay, what?  Many things can be done with them, a hundred things, a thousand things—­had we once got a soul and begun to try.  This one thing of doing for them by ’underselling all people,’ and filling our own bursten pockets by the road; and turning over all care for any ‘population,’ or human or divine consideration, except cash only, to the winds, with a ‘Laissez-faire’ and the rest of it; this is evidently not the thing.  ‘Farthing cheaper per yard;’ no great nation can stand on the apex of such a pyramid; screwing itself higher and higher:  balancing itself on its great toe!  Can England not subsist without being above all people in working?  England never deliberately proposed such a thing.  If England work better than all people, it shall be well.  England, like an honest worker, will work as well as she can; and hope the gods may allow her to live on that basis. Laissez-faire and much else being once dead, how many ‘impossibles’ will become possible!  They are ‘impossible’