Mr John Bright on Free Trade.

Wairarapa Standard, Volume XVIII, Issue 1778, 4 January 1886, Page 3

Mr John Bright on Free Trade.

Mr John Bright ■ ' strint, near Giastonbury, in the I’u ... ■ tiry division of Wells, for the purpose of opening Crispin Hall. The right hon. gentleman was present at the formal opening in the afternoon, and said :—Two years ago I was travelling here from Templecombe, and met a gentleman in the cheese trade who was intimate with the farmers, and said to him, “ Forty years ago labourers got seven shillings a week,” and ho replied, “ You wouldn’t get them about here for less than 14s or 15a now.” The labourers do not work as long as they did, and have also certain concessions—not by Act of Parliament, but by general opinion among the farmers and others with whom they have been employed. The shoemakers got 14s a week,and the masons, carpenters, and joiners were getting also 14s. They get now about 20s, and in many cases probably about 25s a week. There has been no recent period iu which the condition of the working people, whether they be labourers in your country, or shoemakers in this village, or artisans in Glastonbury, or persons working in our mills in Yorkshire, has been lifted so far above the poverty of 40 years ago as now. If bread is so much cheaper, if 31bs of sugar can'now be bought for the price of lib, surely that is great gain, and it can be shown, beyond all contradiction, that the reform of oar tariff and our Free Trade system have made this possible. Every bouse and every family now has greater receipts and smaller expenditure, and the reform of our tariff, which was effected mainly in consequence of the agitation of the Corn Law League—first of all by the late Sir Robert Peel—one of the greatest Ministers that this country has had, not only in our time, but for centuries probably, and after Sir Robert Peel the work was carried on to a greeter extent and as successfully by Mr Gladstone. I was speaking to a friend one day about a district not very far from this, and the observation was while such a place belonged to Lord Somebody there never was a school there until the Education Act passed. There were hundreds, and perhaps thousands of parishes in which there was no school, and people bad no chance of raising themselves at all from the condition in which they were then. Depression ol low wages, by occasional employment, by frequent absolute poverty, their children growing up absolutely ignorant, what can be conceived worse than the condition of families in that state ? And yet that was the stale of scores of thousands ol families throughout Great Britain, England and Wales particularly. You have beard lately some discussion about the question of free schools. I think a good deal may be said for free schools under many circumstances, and under other circumstances there are some things which may be said against them. But this I will say, without hesitation, tint I think as a mere burden upon parents, the payment of a penny, or twopence, or threepence— whatever it may be —fora child fur his week's education, is not a burden from which conscientious parents ought to shrink. Then there is another instrument of education which we are all acquainted with. That is the newspaper. Now, the taxes upon newspapers were imposed as far hack as the reign of Queen Anne. We all know Queen Anne is dead, hut the taxes lived very long after they were imposed—not for the purpose of raising money for the Exchequer, but for the purpose of doing what they dare not do openly—that was, strangling as far as they could the freedom of the Press. Well, what has been the result of abolishing these taxes—and it was the same party in the House of Commons who compelled the abolition of these taxes on newspapers that compelled the abolition of these taxes upon corn and sugar ? The result is that now yon have hundreds of newspapers, and the efect of these newspapers all over the country mat be educational to a high degree. The abolition of the Com Laws, which allowed the importation of wheat from every part of the world whence it can be grown cheaper, and sent here, and the unhappy pressure of the last few years, bad harvests have broken down the landed system of Englaud, and no power on earth can set it up again. What 1 want with regard to the land system is not many or any new fangled propositions. What I want is that we should at first remove all the the obstructions which the present law puts in the way of the easy transfer and the division of land. Let us have the same sound principles all over the country with regard to the land that we have with regard to other things, and if by any possibility an improvement can be brought about, then yon should take some extra and different means for arriving at the end you wish to gain.