Spencer Heath Archive

Item 3129

Quote from Richard Cobden’s last speech made in public (Speeches, vol. ii. P.367), cited by James E. Thorold Rogers, Cobden and Modern Political Opinion, Chapter III, “The Land Question.” London: MacMillan and Co., 1873.

“If I were five-and-twenty or thirty, instead of, unhappily, twice that number of years, I would take Adam Smith in hand, and I would have a League for free trade in Land just as we had a League for free trade in corn. You will find just the same authority in Adam Smith for the one as for the other; and if it were only taken up as it must be taken up to succeed, not as a political, revolutionary, Radical, Chartist notion, but taken up on politico-economic grounds, the agitation would be certain to succeed .. then, I say, the men who do that will have done for England probably more than we have been able to do by making free trade in corn.”