"The meeting is further of opinion that no relief from general or local taxation, which would be consistent with the maintenance of public faith and the efficiency of public establishments, could enable the British and colonial producer successfully to compete with foreign productions; and that the only hope of replacing the agricultural and other native and colonial interests in a state of prosperity rests on the re-establishment of a just system of import duties.
"The meeting deeply deplores that the distressing and destructive consequences of the system of miscalled Free Trade having been repeatedly and urgently pressed on the attention of Parliament, the House of Commons has treated the just complaints of the people with indifference, has exhibited a total want of sympathy for their sufferings, and has refused to adopt any measures for removing or alleviating the prevalent difficulty and distress.
"This conduct has naturally produced a widely-diffused feeling of disappointment, discontent, and distrust, which is rapidly undermining the reliance of the people in the justice and wisdom of Parliament, the best security for loyalty to the Throne, and for the maintenance of the invaluable institutions of the country.
"Having thus faithfully represented to your lordship the general views on the policy of the country, expressed in the recorded resolutions of the meeting we represent, we proceed to discharge the further duty intrusted to us of addressing your lordship as the head of that Administration by which the policy so strongly deprecated is continued and defended.
"We are charged earnestly to remonstrate and protest on the part of the deeply injured thousands whose property has been torn from them by the unjust and suicidal impolicy of which we complain; and still more emphatically on behalf of the millions of the industrial population dependent on them for employment, and consequently for subsistence, against the longer continuance of a system which, under the specious name of Free Trade, violates every principle of real freedom, since it dooms the taxed, fettered, and disqualified native producer to unrestricted competition in his own market with the comparatively unburdened foreigner. We not only deny the moral right of any government or of any legislature to have involved in certain loss and suffering large masses of a flourishing community, for the sake of giving trial to a mere experiment; but we assert that the experiment has been tried, and has signally and disastrously failed, and we demand therefore, as the right of those we represent, the prompt restoration of that protection from unrestricted foreign import which can alone rescue them from impending destruction.