Now there is no misrepresentation in the statements of the master manufacturer. Every word is true.

    The silver-platers of the Continent undersell us twenty per cent. in price, and fifty in pattern.  Still the blind will not see.

    In another year, perhaps, the merchants of Sheffield will import cutlery from Germany, the German scissors being already fifty per cent. cheaper than ours; for the cutlers of Modlin pay only fifteen-pence per stone for bread, while we pay three shillings.  Still the blind will not see.

    The cutlers of Belgium make and sell for twenty-pence a complete set of steel knives and forks, consisting of twenty-four pieces, and the saw-makers of Belgium make and sell, for one shilling and sixpence each, saws equal to ours at nearly twice the price.  But then the Belgian artisans and capitalists are not impoverished by Act of Parliament.  Still the blind will not see.

    The Russians, in the market of New York, undersell John Bacher's razors thirty per cent.,  Joseph Rodgers and Sons' forty per cent., and cast cutlery, in general, fifty per cent; for the Russian workmen, when they buy two pecks of corn, do not lose, or throw away, the price of one peck;  in other words, they are not compelled by law to give a shilling or eight-pence.  Still the blind will not see.

    "Oh, but we shall soon have our bread as cheap as our neighbours."  Yes, when our manufacturers have left the kingdom  -  when we have neither edge tools, nor saws, nor knives, nor scissors, nor money, to give in exchange for bread, we shall have it as cheap as our neighbours have it; for capital will not stay here, for potato-profits, if it can get roast-beef profits elsewhere.   But the blind will then see.  Instead of obtaining, permanently, as they might have done, the fair average price of Europe for their wheat, say 40s. per quarter, at their doors, they must be then satisfied with two-thirds of that price, say about 24s. per quarter, at Hamburgh or Amsterdam.  -  Hey, then  -  but not for a miracle;  -  let the blind see when it is too late; if they are to be a fate unto themselves; and it is written that they shall break stones on the high roads for their subsistence!  But how horrifying to our souls, to our bones in the grave, will be the music of their gruntle, when, after receiving eighteen-pence for twelve hour's hard labour, they visit the paradise of the market, and there, with their miserable earnings, buy bread  -  not at 36 pence per stone, as their victims do, but at fifteen!  "Good bye, fine fellow!"  "Who is that vagabond?"  -  "Lord, Sir, he was once a great gentleman, who kept a parson of his own!"  "Well, if the enemy thank God for crime and carnage, may not we thank him if he make themselves his instruments in ridding us of a nuisance  -  these suicides of their prosperity, who toil not, neither do they spin? Have they not wickedly and foolishly destroyed more capital, in the memory of one generation, than all the lands of England would sell for at the bread-tax price; and in less than twenty years produced more crime and misery than all other causes in a hundred?  This is a subject on which the press has basely, and almost universally, shrunk from the performance of its duty, to the infinite injury of the people, and now probably inevitable and hopeless ruin of their oppressors, who seemed doomed to open their eyes on the edge of a precipice, over which they must plunge headlong.  But of all the treason against all in this matter, that of the Philosophers of Useful Knowledge has the most brass in it.  They calmly ask, what the workmen would say if a conspiracy existed to raise the price of beef, butter, bread and ale.  As if that conspiracy were not the cause of all our heart-burnings, our agonies and our despair!

     It is frightfully amusing, dismally instructive, to observe the deep hatred, the blasting scorn, with which the working classes of this town, and their betters, as they are called, regard each other.  They are all deplorably ignorant on the subjects which most nearly concern them all; but the workmen, I think, are less ignorant than their employers, in spite of the pains which have been and are taken by the ultra-pious and intellectual to keep them in ignorance.  Will your readers believe, that the Westminster Review  -  the book most likely to teach our workmen what they most need to know  -  has been, and is excluded, by an express law, from our Mechanics' Library?  Such, however, is the fact;*  the wisest and the best have had their way, and we are now reaping the consequences.  But if our first merchants themselves have yet to learn the alphabet of political economy, can we wonder that rich and poor alike are quarrelling about effects when they ought to be removing causes?

    Nor is it less horribly amusing and instructive to observe, how completely the aristocratic leaven has leavened the whole mass of society here.  Even our beggary has its castes.  All try to seem rich, that they may not be thought poor; and all, but the tax-fed, are in danger of poverty.  Perhaps the most frightful symptom of our social disease is exhibited by the masters who have been workmen, and who exceed in arrogance and insolence, by many degrees, the cab-driving sons of the sons of the dunghill sprung.  Next to them, in their vituperation of the poor, are the insolvent  -  and their name is Legion.  There must be some reason why Calamity, like an old woman, lives for ever.  Hanging by a hair over the grave dug for hope, do they vilify the all-plundered poor to conciliate the rich?  If so, the flattered and the flatterer are worthy of each other.

"Well, Mister What's-your-name.  I hear you still think we must have a free trade, or a revolution."  "Yes, I do."  "But if we have a free trade, what will become of the landlords?"  "They never ask what will become of you, if we do not have a free trade.  Why care for people who care for no body but themselves?  Your wheelbarrow is not a coach and tour; it is the grapery that is in danger, not your grand epergne, plated with sham silver."  "Well, but Mister What's-your-name, how is your trade now?"  "Very bad."  "Pshaw...  we never prospered more than at present.  Look at that new street; what an income is rising there!"  "That income is not rising but sinking.  More than one-half of the capital expended there is already lost for ever, in taxes on wood, bricks and bread."  "Bread! come that is a droll joke!  What has bread to do with building?  The money, however, must have come from somewhere."  "True; but do you know that the poor-rates of England and Wales last year increased by eight per cent. on the average?  There is not one county upon which to hang a quibble; not one was stationary, in not one was there a decrease; and the increase was greatest in those counties on which depends the prosperity of all the rest.  In Warwickshire, the increase was 16 per cent.  -  In Lancashire, 22.  Does this look like prosperity?  A little more such prosperity will close the manufactories from one end of the kingdom to the other; and then your favourite, Wetherell, will see the difference between a mob that chooses to do evil and one that cannot avoid doing it."  "Well, but Mister What's-your-name, you should not be ungrateful.  You see, God has sent his scourge, the cholera, among us."  "A few months since, a very big man, in a certain great house, blamed his Majesty's Ministers for the precautions they took against that disease.  Shortly afterwards it arrived at his own door, but it passed on, and entered not; how, then, can it be of God?"  "Well you are a queer fellow, Mister What's-your-name.  But what do you think of your Radicals now?  The men are masters."  "Yes, Sir; but, instead of trying to establish low wages, which signify low profits, had you not better try to raise profits by joining with your men, heart and land, to effect the removal of the great cause of contention?"  "What!  Submit to the beggars?  I would starve first."  "Now, Mr Sneak-for-nought, if you were weighed, are you worth three-halfpence?  First, let it be possible for you to become rich in England, and then, perhaps you may despise the poor without being ridiculous."

"But our magnificos are magnificos indeed.  We have, at least half a dozen ancients of yesterday, who, rather than suffer the Reform Bill to pass, and see the rabble, as the saying is, rise in intellect and respectability, would welcome the Russian despot and his cossacks.  They openly declare they would."  "Well, Mr. What's-your-name, what do you want with me?"  "I have been writing another book, and wish you to subscribe."  "Why don't you write a book which a gentleman could read?"  "I am not a gentleman, Sir."  "If you are, you are queer one.  Put me down for a copy, however; I suppose I must patronise your vanity, or whatever else you call it.  But what do you think of things now?"  "Our ministers are not fit to make tailors of."  "Very true, Sir." "Would you not rather live under the Emperor Nicholas than under a Government like ours?" "I have more than once thought I should." "Well, we shall soon have him here, and better him than the rabble. We want a vigorous Government."

    Now these magnificoes care not one straw whether their king be called William or Nicholas; but when they talk of a  "vigorous government,"  they intend that the slave-whip shall be wielded by themselves; they never imagine, for a moment, that a barbarian, as unlettered as his horse, might possibly knout the holy cross on their respectable backs, from huckster to huckster and buttock to buttock?  I know not whether they had the pleasure and the honour to inform Lord Wharncliffe that nobody likes the Reform Bill; but, I hope, neither he nor they will wait for wisdom; until the long maned charger of the Scythian shout over his hay in their drawing-rooms,  "Aha! where are they?"  There is no occasion for the assistance of the Muscovite to complete our destruction; England can ruin herself.  Our great merchants and manufacturers acknowledge that their business is profitless, but they cannot see that there is a cause in operation which will deprive us of our trade, even if the master wholly resign his profits, and the artisan his wages.  It is vain to reason with the least unreasoning of the magnificoes; not one of them can be made to believe that he has lost the ten thousand pounds which he never possessed.  It is quite impossible, they all say, to lose what does not exist.  The assertion is absurd, but seems unanswerable; and so, Calamity, like these old women, lives for ever.

    There is one subject on which the great vulgar of this town are near unanimous in opinion, I mean the necessity of an issue of small notes.  They know nothing about the laws of currency; on the contrary, if put to their choice, they would, I verily believe, choose Pitt's inconvertible ones.  We have, however, a few reasoning maniacs, who pretend to know Something of the matter, and who presume to doubt whether Pitt's Bill or Peel's Bill has done most mischief.  They audaciously enquire how it happened that, a Ministry, advocating the principle of free trade, interfered with the natural laws of currency, and consequently with the freedom of trade in money?  They actually impugn the wisdom of encouraging a huge and mischievous banking establishment, to the injury of all the useful banks in the nation.  They stupidly imagine that there is no difference, in principle, between a one-pound note and a five-pound note; and they wonder, with the simplicity of idiotcy, why we are compelled to have the note which we do not want, and prevented from having the note which we do want.  They innocently ask why bankers should not be allowed to issue one-pound notes payable in gold at the counter, and with no other restraint than the mutual watchfulness and jealousy of the respective issuers!  When told that if one pound notes reappear, the gold coins will disappear, they reply, that if so, very few gold coins can be wanted; and that, by an issue of small notes, controlled by no law but the natural law of the case, "one pound might indeed be made to do the work of five."  When reminded of the crisis of 1825, they ridiculously assert that the law alone was the cause of the crisis - that the law which sagaciously made one overgrown bank liable to furnish specie for the whole realm, and furnish it in greatest abundance, when directly interested in furnishing none at all.  For, they say, if the thousand banks of the Empire had each been liable to provide gold (not Bank paper) for the payment of its own notes, all the gold wanted would have been found; and no inconvenience whatever would have been sustained by them or the community.  When told that theory is but theory, they sneeringly answer, that Watt's steam engine was theory 50 years ago.  These fellows, I have little doubt, would rather give a shilling for a peck of good foreign wheat, than thrice that sum for the same quantity and quality grown in their own country.  If I were in authority, I would hang every man of them tomorrow. 

    I know, Gentleman, you do not agree with me on the Currency Question and perhaps not altogether upon other points - but you will be glad, perhaps, to give insertion to these opinions of a great manufacturing town.  The people to be governed well, must be known well.

- I have the honour to be, your most obediant servant,

Ebenezer Elliott

*    Such is not the fact, but entirely a mistake. The Westminster Review is regularly taken at the Mechanics' Library, and has been ever since its comencement, except during eighteen months from July, 1823, to the end of the following year, when it was excluded, not by an express law, but by a vote of the Committee.  Such an error as this naturally leads to the enquiry, "Has Mr Elliott been more careful to ascertain the correctness of the rest of his facts?"  What is the quality of razors which the Russians can sell thirty per cent. cheaper than Mr Barber, and forty per cent. cheaper than Messrs Rodgers and Sons?
                                                                                           - Editor, Sheffield Daily Independent

    The comments made about Elliott by the editor of the newspaper clearly irritated the Corn Law Rhymer since he promptly shot a letter off to the newspaper.  The letter appears here below; it was collected by Diane Gascoyne & has never been spotted before by other Elliott enthusiasts.

TO THE EDITOR OF THE SHEFFIELD INDEPENDENT