Tait's Edinburgh Review frequently published articles by the Corn Law Rhymer. Elliott clearly had a good relationship with the proprietor of the journal. The article below appeared when Elliott was 59 years old in 1840 though the article was written the previous year. Elliott's age allowed "the Venerable Bard" to make his thoughts known as an older and wiser statesman. The article is rather long: Elliott claiming the privilege of old age to ramble on and on. The title of the article being a good clue to its content.

    Elliott makes some interesting comments about his father who was also called Ebenezer Elliott. Elliott senior is described as a born rebel and as an amateur preacher who fervantly believed that most men were not destined to go to heaven! His radical nature was reflected by his household pictures of Cromwell, Putnam and Hampden. While an aquatint of Washington displayed his support for American independance.The paintings in the family home yield more information about the Corn Law Rhymer's father. Clearly he appreciated a good painting and was comfortably off to be able to purchase these works of art. Later on in this article, Elliott mentions his father being hounded out of society for his views. So Elliott senior was strong-minded enough to stick to his guns despite the hostility of his peers.

    Although the Edinburgh Review respected Elliott's work, the poet had what was to be proved a realistic view of his writings: "how paltry, in bulk and value, is the amount of my scribble." He realised his work was "probably soon to be forgotten, or not opened once in half a century."  Even so, he wondered why he had been a scribbler for so many years and then he supplied the answer that he had a love of lovely things: his early poetry often dwelling on the beauty of his natural surroundings. But he also announced that he had a hatred of oppression and went on to make a significant statement about his character and his world view: "I do not remember the time when I was not dissatisfied with the condition of society. Without ever envying any man for his wealth or power,I have always wondered why the strong oppress the weak; and I have never wanted cause to blush for my species." This remark by the bard reveals how driven he was and why he wrote so much: he wanted to draw attention to the hardship people were suffering and to help bring about change in society.
 
    Elliott's article continues this argument. He discusses the injustices perpetuated by the landowners; he deals with the problems caused by the food tax; warns of the catastrophy facing the country unless change is brought about and he wonders whether the Chartists will make things better or worse.

    An interesting view of jury service also appears in the article where Elliott details his experiences as a juror in York in 1838.

   The Poet of the Poor ends his article characteristically by referring sarcastically to the Duke of Richmond as "His Grace" and then critising "the thankless insolence of this titled pauper."

Random Thoughts And Reminiscences

By The Corn Law Rhymer

(From Tait's Edinburgh Magazine 1840)

 

 

         READER  - To have lived in an age of mighty events, with mightiest consequences, to look back on those events, and forward to those consequences, and, without having partaken much in them as an actor, to find oneself a portion of them and of their great history, and one’s life a running commentary on the progress of some of the greatest questions that ever agitated the public mind; is not the privilege of every man of three score, and, perhaps, not mine.

        It is now 46 years since I quarrelled with my father because he denied that one Englishman could thrash five Frenchmen. His little preaching parlour (he preached for love, not money, and believed that 99 in the 100 of his fellow men would be damned) was adorned with aquatints of Oliver Cromwell, Israel Putnam, John Hampden and George Washington, and the glorious victories of Lexington and Bunkers Hill. The good man (he was an old Cameronian and born rebel) did not fail to tell me what sort of victories these were. Still, I was slow to believe that we did not win. Oh, the roast beef of old England and Wellington’s victory of Watergroo! How much wiser we are then our fathers!

        I am 58 years old and have been 43 years a scribbler. Of more than two-thirds of a long life, scarcely a month has passed in which I did not write on some subject or other. Yes, how paltry, in bulk and value, is the amount of my scribble; small volume, destined probably to be soon forgotten, or not opened once in half a century. Men now call me “Venerable Bard”, confound them! But I have won the old man’s privilege, and at last become a prattler. Why did I write so much? For love - love of the lovely; hatred of oppression being only another name for that passion. I do not remember the time when I was not dissatisfied with the condition of society. Without never envying any man for his wealth or power, I have always wondered why the strong oppress the weak; and I have never wanted cause to blush for my species. At the close of nearly three score years, I find that the many, who ought to be a fate unto themselves, are miserable because the few make them so. Precious word, Representation! when wilt thou be a thing?

 

        I remember the days of Pitt, Fox, and Sheridan, and I live in those of Peel - a statesman who seems to have been born to tumble downstairs, without breaking his neck. His father got rich by working the steam engine; the son is to win immortality by taking up spinster's stitches with the good old knitting-pins of our grandmothers. The policy which he advocates will beggar his heirs. To us, he died before he was born. His mind by the intellectual growth around him; the cruel sunshine in which he lives, covers him all over as with a nightmare. Yet, what a fuss he makes! And what the fuss is made about him, by other spinsters! The thought of him always brings to my remembrance a great man, who, about 40 years ago, regularly made his appearance on market days in my native town. He had no crest, or coat of arms, like the baronet, but he wore the tin plate in front of his hat, after the manner of sow-gelders, as he strutted among the farmers, with a constant jerk right and left, and an elegant hutch-up of his breeches, proclaiming to the crowd of marketers, “The most noble and famous rat catcher from Poland!” Yet, this personage was not a mere pretender to rat catching, as the baronet is to statesmanship; he could, and did kill vermin.

        The darkest year of my life was the year 1803; for, in that year, a landed annuitant, name Western, (Oh, what frail things are gibbets and pillories!) laid foundation of the present food monopoly, in a duty of 24s 3d per quarter on imported wheat. Twelve years afterwards, he and his brethren contrived absolutely to exclude foreign live cattle and fresh meat from the British market. This man is now a Lord. He is called a man of property. He lives in a palace, not in a workhouse. No tribunal sends him to the treadmill; and his descendants probably will sit on grand juries, to find true bills against his victims!

        I have lived to unlearn a great and prevailing fallacy, that in this country the interests of masters and workmen are identical. Nothing can be more false. The direct contrary must be true. Why? Because in countries where laws restrict food, without restricting population, profits can only be sustained by reducing wages. So long then, as our Corn-Laws continue, strikes and unions, with a very efficient demand for labour, can alone enable workmen here to obtain as high wages as are obtained in Switzerland and other countries where Corn-Laws and strikes are alike unknown. When this is understood, (and it is of infinite importance that it should be), masters and workmen will combine against the common  enemy. Then, and not before, the unnatural laws, which place the interests in opposition, will be repealed; for the authors of those laws, like all men who have obtained an unjust privilege, stubbornly refused to understand their own case! To a man, they believe in the Right Divine of land. They really have faith in Richard Oastler and Feargus O'Connor. It is not their selfishness, but their ignorance, that wants removing; and nothing short of our unanimous resistance to their misrule, can startle them into a knowledge of the truth.

        About two years since I was summoned to York, on a jury, the case to be tried being, “Widow Somebody, tenant, v. Rafe Cheeke, landowner. The widow’s husband, on his deathbed, (not dreaming that she would lose the farm), fallowed about 80 acres of land; but immediately after his death, she got notice to quit, Cheeke refusing to pay for the fallow; so she sued him for the cost of it - about £740. A special jury of landowners was summoned to try the case; but for some reason the name of a single tradesman appeared on the list. When eleven landowners had answered, and many other landowners had been called, without answering, the man who called the names boggled at mine, but, at last, with sweet reluctant delay syllabled out “E-be-nezer El-liott, of Sheffield!” Four respectable witnesses proved the plaintiffs case; and, as 11 of the jurors were landowners, the defendant, I thought, if his defence was worth a straw, with the jury; but the judge, without hearing one of the defendant’s witnesses, nonsuited the wretched plaintiff. On a previous occasion, I had found some difficulty in obtaining the money, (£1) which is allowed towards the expenses of special jurors, that I know who held it insisting on paying only one half of it; But, on the occasion to which I now allude, the jurors being landowners had taken care to be paid beforehand; that is to say, the money had been given for distribution to one of their number; as tough-looking a slave driver as can well be imagined. A steak cut out of the tenderest part of him, I suspect, would draw the teeth of the stoutest handloom weaver now in the state of vegetation. His eyes (they had the genuine landowner’s gunpowder expression) seemed constantly to go off at half cock: and if thou wilt suppose that his brain was made of iron wire, which had grown through the skull of him, and appeared outside in the shape of black pig’s bristles, thou wilt have some idea of the thatch under which this savage dwelt;  but it would would require a Fielding to describe the frown which he gave me, when I held out my hand for the money. “What,” he seemed to say to himself, “shall a landowner do an act of mere justice to one of his feeders without insulting him?” the cash shamed to be fashioned through his palm to the black wire in his heart and brain; but, at last, with a sob, or grunt, or growl, he paid it; and then, he, and his beggarly brethren, set up a huge horse laugh.  I whispered to my heart, as I sneaked out of court, with my friend “Gospel Luke,” a respectable attorney, “We know what we are, but we know not what we may be. Who would be a landowner’s tenants at will; or that tenant’s sub-slave; or that sub-slave’s son tried in the landowner’s parlour for killing God’s hares; or the landowner’s younger son, if unable to quarter himself on the public purse; or the landowner himself, beggared if the public refuse to pay the interest of his mortgage? Now there is no refusal like – “We cannot pay.” Oh, ye widows and ye orphans!

        Throughout my long life, I have only met with one landowner, and never with the landowner’s underling - no, not even a land valuer - who did not talk as if he thought he had a right to trample on all who are not landowners. Forty years ago, gentlemen farmers, when flushed with the, not then unusual, grape, delighted to ride over townsfolk on the king’s highway. Now, the sons of those gentlemen farmers are literally slaves, viler than the Virginian negro; and their masters ride roughshod over them and us. O triumphs that won a food tax, which is to end in revolution! national debts, then, are not public wealth! taxation without representation is not liberty! and inconvertible one pound notes, depreciated 30%, (as Tony Lumpkin found, when he went to Paris after the war), were never worth 20 silver shillings each! My poor father (the rebel) was right, after all! and so they hunted him out of society for his honesty and wisdom.

        Some months ago - soon after the cotton princes (poor devils!) had condescended to see, for the first time, the precipice on which the landowners’ monopoly has placed their fortunes, I dined with a merchant. My fellow guest was a green coloured young barrister, with a poetical sloped forehead, like a lean-to roof; and he talked (Lord help us!) of  becoming a member of the British senate! “If” said he – the Corn Laws having become a subject of conversation – “if the Corn-Laws are to be repealed, an act must be passed to compel mortgagees to take two and half instead of five per cent interest, or gentlemen will be ruined.”  “Agreed” said I “provided that mortgagees, when they become law-makers, shall charge gentlemen ten per cent interest instead of five.” “That”, said he, “would be spoliation.”  “Ah,” I replied, “Tat is an honest fellow, but Tit is a rogue; and yet Tit for Tat is fair.”

        “Landed idlers! If your monopoly has already cost the industrious more than all the land is worth, and if they who have been forced to pay for it take possession of it, what sort of case for restitution will you bring into the Court of Chancery?

        The sayings and doings in parliament, during the late debates on the Corn-Laws, have not raised the landowners in my estimation. As Sir Walter Scott once asked, with charming simplicity, “What must be the condition of that country where the land is stolen?” so, one of the honourable gentleman asked, “What was to become of property, if landowners were to be prevented by the Ballot and Free Trade from paying the interest of their mortgages?” By property, then, these landed worthies mean the right to bribe, rob, and starve others.

        The most applauded of their speeches was made by Wincelsea’s son, Maidstone, who declared” That, in seeking Free Trade, the manufacturers wanted a slice from the landowner’s capital”. The poor youth is not aware, that if the landowners cannot live without Corn Laws, they have no capital.

        But the wisest of their sayings was uttered by a Duke Richmond, who said, “That if he thought the Corn Laws would be repealed, he would sell his land, and emigrate.” Beautiful! If their intention were to sell their land and emigrate, we could understand them; but it will be with their heirs,” as when a hungry man dreameth, and behold he eateth, but he awakeneth, and his soul is empty.”

        Can the present state of things last? Can the catastrophe to which it points be prevented? “Yes,” say the Chartists, (and let our oppressors remember that Chartism is the child of their misrule), “yes, Universal Suffrage would prevent it.” But can the Chartists obtain universal suffrage? If they cannot, it will not be the fault of our tyrants. The lords and squires have become Jacobins. About six years ago, they established, in our large towns, newspapers, called Radical, the editors of which - men with loud voices, brazen faces and big bread-baskets - were commanded to prevent the People from seeing the Corn Laws; so they placed before the eyes of the half-informed multitude the Elective Franchise, and, not in their newspapers only, but at public meetings, bade them demand Universal Suffrage, Annual Parliaments, Paid Members, and the Ballot. Well, do not the people see the Corn Laws? They feel them. Have the aristocracy, then, gained their end? Yes, as Samson gained his when he brought the temple down. Ignorant that true opinions never recede, they have taught millions to demand the franchise, whose children might never have thought of it. This is an untoward event, both for the aristocracy and their victims, unless the former mean to commit suicide. Two years ago, I did not venture to hope, that, in my time, the people generally would even think of obtaining the franchise. Now, thank God and the Tories! they resolutely demand it; but, alas! while they are demanding it, our trade is departing to other shores. Are you aware, Parson Justice! that your food monopoly threatens to stop the steam engine itself? You may put down by force the mob that will riot; but what is to suppress the mob that must? When in France, the spade was broken; when the hammer was silenced, and the saw palsied; when French mothers, everywhere, were in the streets, crying “Bread! bread!” and there was no bread; when woman had changed her nature, and said to her husband “Come and fight,” instead  of saying “Stay at home!” did Universal Suffrage prevent the horrors of famine? No! “the Constitution would not march!”* but Anarchy and Murder marched through every hamlet and every city, and every lane and street of every hamlet and city in the empire. What, then, is to be done? The middle classes could, if they were wise, prescribe a palliative for the national disorder; but a guard of armed householders supposes certain preliminaries. Perhaps the affrighted authors of a great political blunder will try to retard its consequences by coercing the people. Let them beware lest their force be wanted everywhere, and found nowhere; above all, let them beware how they compel the unanimous masses to use tactics which could not fail to give victory to the greatest number. At present, they are safe; for the mere working men of England and Scotland are not the greatest number. But “the affair cries haste!” and, I think, it would cost less time to repeal the food-monopoly than to educate and enfranchise the millions, and less still to obtain a separate legislature for manufactures and trade. It is quite possible, and would not be found difficult, for the districts of London, Bristol, Birmingham, Leicester, Sheffield, Leeds, Manchester, Liverpool, Newcastle, Edinburgh, and Glasgow, to form a second Hanseatic League; and, in spite of the palaced paupers, exchange their goods for foreign food. This league established, the mortgagees of the monopolists would be glad to pay us, towards the cost of their food-tax, say forty per cent., for the privilege of selling their produce in our markets. And to this, or something like it, we must come at last; for no fully-peopled country can long maintain its independence, unless it untax its commercial capital, labour, and skill. The selfishness of the landowners can only anticipate an event ordained of God. If it were not just that land, (God’s second gift to all,) should, when usurped by a few, pay the taxes of all, the time is rapidly approaching when, in this country, it must pay them; and, if the landowners wish to postpone that time, they will immediately abolish the food-tax.

        They have already forced thinking men to inquire whether the State ought not to be sole landowner? and I don’t like such inquiries; for I am myself a landowner. They may, if they please, jeopardize their own lives, and the possession of that property which they still call theirs; but what right have they to endanger my life or property? I have done nothing worthy of death or confiscation; and my property is of my own earning – “a stake, not stolen from the public hedge, but planted there.” Nor are their children criminal. Surely, then, if nothing but confusion can come of barbarism in the midst of civilisation, when such barbarism is the ruling power; and if the widespread demoralisation, which threatens to break the social contract, is an effect of that ignorant greediness in high places which has declared, by Act of Parliament, “that Rascality alone shall thrive,” surely they, whose possessions cannot be hidden, will no longer undermine the foundations of property, but haste to act wisely, “ere their ruin come as one that travelleth, and their want as an armed man.”

*See Thomas Carlyle’s “History of the French Revolution.”

In a footnote, Elliott added the  following observation:-

Six months after the date of this article, his Grace of Richmond is reported to have said in Parliament, “That the manufacturers ought not to forget the progress they have made under the protection of the Corn Laws.” How his Grace would gasp and stare if addressed thus by a parasite whom he had been forced to maintain – “Duke, what a beggar you would have been had I not compelled you to keep me!” Yet such is the exact meaning of the words addressed to his feeders by the thankless insolence of this titled pauper.

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