FROM THE SPEECH ON INCENDIARISM IN IRELAND (1844)

The great and all-present evil of the rural districts is this--you have
too many people for the work to be done, and you, the landed
proprietors, are alone responsible for this state of things; and to
speak honestly, I believe many of you know it. I have been charged with
saying out-of-doors that this House is a club of land-owners legislating
for land-owners. If I had not said it, the public must long ago have
found out that fact. My honorable friend the member for Stockport on one
occasion proposed that before you passed a law to raise the price of
bread, you should consider how far you had the power to raise the rates
of wages. What did you say to that? You said that the laborers did not
understand political economy, or they would not apply to Parliament to
raise wages; that Parliament could not raise wages. And yet the very
next thing you did was to pass a law to raise the price of produce of
your own land, at the expense of the very class whose wages you
confessed your inability to increase.

What is the condition of the county of Suffolk? Is it not notorious that
the rents are as high as they were fifty years ago, and probably much
higher? But the return for the farmer's capital is much lower, and the
condition of the laborer is very much worse. The farmers are subject to
the law of competition, and rents are thereby raised from time to time
so as to keep their profits down to the lowest point, and the laborers
by the competition amongst them are reduced to the point below which
life cannot be maintained. Your tenants and laborers are being devoured
by this excessive competition, whilst you, their magnanimous landlords,
shelter yourselves from all competition by the Corn Law yourselves have
passed, and make the competition of all other classes serve still more