 CHAPTER XIV. FEW CHAPTERS OF POLITICAL HISTORY AT MODERN TIMES HAVE GIVEN OCCASION FOR MORE CONTROVERSY THAN THAT WHICH CONTAINS THE STORY OF Sir Robert Peel's administration in its dealing with the Corn Laws. Told in the briefest form, the story is that Peel came into office in 1841 to maintain the Corn Laws, and that in 1846 he repealed them. The controversy as to the wisdom or unwisdom of repealing the Corn Laws has long since come to an end. They who were the uncompromising opponents of free trade at that time are proud to call themselves its uncompromising zealots now. Indeed, there is no more chance of a reaction against free trade in England than there is of a reaction against the rule of three. But the controversy still exists, and will probably always be in dispute as to the conduct of Sir Robert Peel. The Melbourne Ministry fell, as we have seen, in consequence of a direct vote of want of confidence moved by their leading opponent, and the return of a majority hostile to them at the general election that followed. The vote of want of confidence was leveled against their financial policy, especially against Lord John Russell's proposal to substitute a fixed duty of eight shillings for Peel's sliding scale. Sir Robert Peel came into office and he introduced a reorganized scheme of a sliding scale, reducing the duties in improving the system, but maintaining the principle. Lord John Russell proposed an amendment declaring that the House of Commons, considering the evils which have been caused by the present Corn Laws, and especially by the fluctuation of the graduated or sliding scale, is not prepared to adopt the measure of Her Majesty's Government, which is founded on the same principles and is likely to be attended by similar results. The amendment was rejected by a large majority, no less than one hundred and twenty-three. But the question between free trade and protection was even more distinctly raised. Mr. Villiers proposed another amendment, declaring for the entire abolition of all duties on grain. Only ninety votes were given for the amendment, while three hundred and ninety-three were recorded against it. Sir Robert Peel's Government therefore came into power distinctly pledged to uphold the principle of protection for home-grown grain. Four years after this Sir Robert Peel proposed the total abolition of the corn duties. For this he was denounced by some members of his party in language more fierce and unmeasured than ever since has been applied to any leading statesman. Mr. Gladstone was never assailed by the staunchest supporter of the Irish Church in words so vituperative as those which rated Sir Robert Peel for his supposed apostasy. One eminent person at least made his first fame as a parliamentary orator, by his denunciations of the great minister whom he had previously eulogised and supported. The history of agricultural distress, it has been well observed, is the history of agricultural abundance. This looks at first sight a paradox, but nothing can in reality be more plain and less paradoxical. Whenever, to follow out the passage, Providence, through the blessing of genial seasons, fills the nation's doors with plenteousness, then and then only has the cry of ruin to the cultivator been proclaimed as the one great evil for legislation to repress. This is indeed the very meaning of the principle of protection. When the commodity which the protected interest has to dispose of is so abundant as to be easily attained by the common body of consumers, then of course the protected interest is injured in its particular way of making money and expects the state to do something to secure it in the principal advantage of its monopoly. The greater quantity of grain a good harvest brings for the benefit of all the people, the less the price the corn grower can charge for it. His interest as a monopolist is always and inevitably opposed to the interest of the community. But it is easy even now and we have almost forgotten the days of protection to see that the corn grower is not likely either to recognize or to admit this conflict of interests between his protection and the public welfare. Apart from the natural tendency of every man to think that that which does him good must do good to the community, there was undoubtedly something very fascinating in the theory of protection. It had a charming give and take, live and let live ere about it. You give me a little more than the market price for my corn, and don't you see I shall be able to buy all the more of your cloth and tea and sugar or to pay you the higher rent for your land. Such a compact seems reasonable and tempting. Almost up to our own time the legislation of the country was in the hands of the classes who had more to do with the growing of corn in the ownership of land than with the making of cotton and the working of machinery. The great object of legislation and of social compacts of whatever kind seem to be to keep the rents of the landowners and the prices of the farmers up to a comfortable standard. It is not particularly to the discredit of the landlords and the farmers that this was so. We have seen in later times how every class in succession has resisted the movement of the principle of free trade when it came to be applied to its own particular interests. The paper manufacturers liked it as little in 1860 as the landlords and farmers had done fifteen years earlier. When the cup comes to be commended to the lips of each interest in turn, we always find that it is received as a poisoned chalice and taken with much shuddering and passionate protestation. The particular advantage possessed by vested interests in the corn laws was that for a long time the landlords possessed all the legislative power and all the prestige as well. There was a certain reverence and sanctity about the ownership of land with its hereditary dissent and its patriarchal dignities which the manufacture of paper could not pretend to claim. If it really were true that the legitimate incomes or the legitimate influence of the landlord class in England went down in any way because of the repeal of the corn laws it would have to be admitted that the landlords like the aristocrats before the French Revolution had done something themselves to encourage the growth of new and disturbing ideas. Before the revolution free thought and the equality and brotherhood of man were beginning to be pet doctrines among the French nobles and among their wives and daughters. It was the whim of the hour to talk Rousseau and to effect indifference to rank and a general faith and a good time coming of a quality and brotherhood. In something of the same fashion the aristocracy of England were for some time before the repeal of the corn laws illustrating a sort of revival of patriarchal ideas about the duties of property. The influence was stirring everywhere. Oxford was beginning to busy itself in the revival of the olden influence of the church. The young England party, as they were then called, were ardent to restore the good old days when the noble was the father of the poor and the chief of his neighborhood. All manner of pretty whimsies were caught up with this ruling idea to give them an appearance of earnest purpose. The young landlord exhibited himself in the attitude of a protector, patron, and friend to all his tenants. Doles were formally given at stated hours to all who would come for them to the castle gate. Young noblemen played cricket with the peasants on their estate, and the Saturnian age was believed, by a good many persons, to be returning for the express benefit of old or rather of young England. There was something like a party being formed in Parliament for the realization of young England's idyllic purposes. It comprised among its numbers several more or less gifted youths of rank who were full of enthusiasm and poetic aspirations and nonsense, and had had the encouragement and support of one man of genius, Benjamin Disraeli, who had no natural connection with the English aristocracy, but who was afterwards destined to be the successful leader of the Conservative and Aristocratic party to be its saviour when it was all but put down in the dust, to guide it to victory and make it once more for the time, at least, supreme in the political life of the country. This brilliant champion of conservatism has often spoken of the repeal of the Corn Laws as the fall of the landlord-class in England. If the landlords fell, it must be said of them, as has been fairly said of many a dynasty, that they never deserved better on the whole than just at the time when the blow struck them down. The famous Corn Law of 1815 was a copy of the Corn Law of 1670. The former measure imposed a duty on the importation of foreign grain, which amounted to prohibition. Wheat might be exported upon the payment of one shilling per quarter customs duty, but importation was practically prohibited until the price of wheat had reached eighty shillings a quarter. The Corn Law of 1815 was hurried through Parliament, absolutely closing the ports against the importation of foreign grain, until the price of our homegrown grain had reached the magic figure of eighty shillings a quarter. It was hurried through despite the most earnest petitions from the commercial and manufacturing classes. A great deal of popular disturbance attended the passing of the measure. There were riots in London, and the houses of several of the supporters of the bill were attacked. Incendiary fires blazed in many parts of the country. In the Isle of Ely there were riots which lasted for two days and two nights, and the aid of the military had to be called in to suppress them. Five persons were hanged as the result of these disturbances. One might excuse a demagogue who compared the event to the suppression of some of the food riots in France just before the revolution, of which we only read that the people, the poor that is to say, turned out demanding bread, and the ring leaders were immediately hanged, and there was an end of the matter. After the Corn Law of 1815 thus ominously introduced, there were sliding scale acts having for their business to establish a varying system of duty, so that according, as the price of home produced wheat rose to a certain height, the duty unimported wheat sank in proportion. The principle of all these measures was the same. It was founded, on the assumption, that the corn grew for the benefit of the grower first of all, and that until he had been secured in a handsome profit the public at large had no right to any reduction in the cost of food. When the harvest was a good one and the golden grain was plenty, then the soul of the grower was afraid, and he called out to Parliament to protect him against the calamity of having to sell his corn any cheaper than in years of famine. He did not see all the time that if the prosperity of the country in general was enhanced he too must come to benefit by it. Naturally it was in places like Manchester that the fallacy of all this theory was first commonly perceived and most warmly resented. The Manchester manufacturers saw that the customers for their goods were to be found in all parts of the world, and they knew that at every turn they were hampered in their dealings with the customers by the system of protective duties. They wanted to sell their goods wherever they could find buyers, and they chafed at any barrier between them and the sale. Later from the time of its first having parliamentary representation, only a few years before the foundation of the anticorn law league, had always spoken out for free trade. The fascinating Sophism which had such charms for other communities that by paying more than was actually necessary for everything all round, Dick enriched Tom, while Tom was at the same time enriching Dick, had no charms for the intelligence and the practical experience of Manchester. The close of the year, 1836, was a period of stagnant trade and general depression arising in some parts of the country to actual and severe suffering. Some members of parliament and other influential men were stricken with the idea, which it does not seem to have required much strength of observation to foster, that it could not be for the advantage of the country in general to have the price of bread very high at a time when wages were very low and work was scarce. A movement against the corn laws began in London. An anticorn law association on a small scale was formed. Its list of members bore the names of more than twenty members of parliament and for a time the society had a look of vigour about it. It came to nothing, however. London has never been found an effective nursery of agitation. It is too large to have any central interest or source of action. It is too dependent socially and economically on the patronage of the higher and wealthier classes. London has never been to England what Paris has been to France. It has hardly ever made or represented thoroughly the public opinion of England during any great crisis. A new centre of operations soon had to be sought and various causes combined to make Lancashire the proper place. In the year 1838 the town of Bolton-Lamours in Lancashire was the victim of a terrible commercial crisis. Thirty out of the fifty manufacturing establishments which the town contained were closed. Nearly a fourth of all the houses of business were closed and actually deserted and more than five thousand workmen were without homes or means of subsistence. All the intelligence and energy of Lancashire was roused. One obvious guarantee against starvation was cheap bread. And cheap bread meant, of course, the abolition of the corn laws, for these laws were constructed on the principle that it was necessary to keep bread dear. A meeting was held in Manchester to consider measures necessary to be adopted for bringing about the complete repeal of these laws. The Manchester Chamber of Commerce adopted a petition to Parliament against the corn laws. The anti-corn law agitation had been fairly launched. From that time it grew and grew in importance and strength. Meetings were held in various towns of England and Scotland. Associations were formed everywhere to cooperate with the movement which had its headquarters in Manchester. In Newell's buildings, Marcus Street, Manchester, the work of the league was really done for years. The leaders of the movement gave up their time day by day to its service. The league had to encounter a great deal of rather fierce opposition from the Chartists, who loudly proclaimed that the whole movement was only meant to entrap them once more into an alliance with the middle classes and the employers, as in the case of the Reform Bill, in order that when they had been made the cats paw again they might again be thrown contemptuously aside. On the other hand, the league had, from the first, the cordial cooperation of Daniel O'Connell, who became one of their principal orators when they held meetings in the Metropolis. They issued pamphlets by hundreds of thousands and sent lecturers all over the country explaining the principle of free trade. A gigantic propaganda of free trade opinions was called into existence. Money was raised by the holding of bazaars and Manchester and in London, and by calling for subscriptions. A bazaar in Manchester brought in ten thousand pounds, one in London raised rather more than double that sum, not including the subscriptions that were contributed. A free trade hall was built in Manchester. This building had an interesting history, full of good omen for the cause. The ground on which the hall was erected was the property of Mr. Cobden and was placed by him at the disposal of the league. That ground was the scene of what was known in Manchester as the massacre of Peterloo. On August 16, 1819, a meeting of Manchester reformers was held on that spot which was dispersed by an attack of soldiers and militia with the loss of many lives. The memory of that day rankled in the hearts of the Manchester Liberals for long after, and perhaps no better means could be found for purifying the ground from the stain and the shame of such bloodshed, then its dedication by the modern Apostle of Peace and Free Trade as a site whereon to build a hall sacred to the promulgation of his favorite doctrines. The times were peculiarly favorable to the new sort of propaganda which came into being with the Antichorn Law League. A few years before such an agitation would hardly have found the means of making its influence felt all over the country. The very reduction of the cost of postage alone must have facilitated its labors to an extent beyond calculation. The inundation of the country with pamphlets, tracks, and reports of speeches would have been scarcely possible into the old system, and would in any case have swallowed up a far larger amount of money than even the league with its ample resources would have been able to supply. In all parts of the country railways were being opened, and these enabled the lecturers of the league to hasten from town to town and to keep the cause always alive in the popular mind. All these advantages, and many others, might however have proved of little avail if the league had not from the first been in the hands of men who seemed as if they came by special appointment to do its work. Great as the work was which the league did, it will be remembered in England almost as much because of the men who won the success as on account of the success itself. The nominal leader of the free trade party and parliament was for many years Mr. Charles Villiers, a man of aristocratic family and surroundings, of remarkable ability, and of the steadfast fidelity to the cause he had undertaken. Nothing is a more familiar phenomenon in the history of English political agitation than the aristocrat who assumes the popular cause and cries out for the rights of the unenfranchised millions. But it was something new to find a man of Mr. Villiers' class devoting himself to a cause so entirely practical and businesslike as that of the repeal of the Corn Laws. Mr. Villiers brought forward for several successive sessions in the House of Commons a motion in favor of the total repeal of the Corn Laws. His eloquence and his argumentative power served the great purpose of drawing the attention of the country to the whole question and making converts to the principle he advocated. The House of Commons has always of late years been the best platform from which to address the country. In political agitation it has thus been made to prepare the way for the schemes of legislation, which it has itself always begun by reprobating. But Mr. Villiers might have gone on for all his life dividing the House of Commons on the question of free trade without getting much nearer to his object, if it were not for the manner in which the cause was taken up by the country and more particularly by the great manufacturing towns of the North. Until the passing of Lord Grey's Reform Bill these towns had no representation in Parliament. They seemed destined after that event to make up for their long exclusion from representative influence by taking the government of the country into their own hands. Of late years they have lost some of their relative influence. They have not now all the power that for no inconsiderable time they undoubtedly possessed. The reforms they chiefly aimed at have been carried and the spirit which in times of stress and struggle kept their populations almost of one mind has less necessity of existence now. Manchester, Birmingham and Leeds are no wit less important to the life of the nation now than they were before free trade, but their supremacy does not exist now as it did then. At that time it was town against country, Manchester representing the town and the whole Conservative at one period almost the whole land-owning body representing the country. The Manchester School as it was called then and for long after had some teachers and leaders who were of themselves capable of making any school powerful and respected, with the Manchester School began a new kind of popular agitation. Up to that time agitation meant appeal to passion and lived by provoking passion. Its cause might be good or bad, but the way of promoting it was the same. The Manchester School introduced the agitation which appealed to reason and argument only, which stirred men's hearts with figures of arithmetic rather than figures of speech and which converted mob meetings to political economy. The real leader of the movement was Mr. Richard Cobden. Mr. Cobden was a man belonging to the Yeoman class. He had received but a moderate education. His father dying while the great free trader was still young, Richard Cobden was taken in charge by an uncle who had a wholesale warehouse in the City of London and who gave him employment there. Cobden afterwards became a partner in a Manchester printed cotton factory and he travelled occasionally on the commercial business of this establishment. He had a great liking for travel, but not by any means as the ordinary tourist travels. The interest of Cobden was not in scenery or in art or in ruins but in men. He studied the condition of countries with a view to the manner in which it affected the men and women of the present and through them was likely to affect the future. On everything that he saw he turned a quick and intelligent eye and he saw for himself and thought for himself. Wherever he went he wanted to learn something. He had in abundance that peculiar faculty which some great men of widely different stamp from him and from each other have possessed, of which Goethe frankly boasted and which Mirobo had more largely than he was always willing to acknowledge. The faculty which exacts from everyone with whom its owner comes in contact some contribution to his stock of information and to his advantage. Cobden could learn something from everybody. It is doubtful whether he ever came into momentary acquaintance with anyone whom he did not compel to yield him something in the way of information. He travelled very widely for a time when travelling was more difficult than it is at present. He made himself familiar with most of the countries of Europe and with many parts of the East and what was then a rarer accomplishment with the United States and Canada. He did not make the familiar grand tour and then dismissed the places he had seen from his active memory. He studied them and visited many of them again to compare early with later impressions. This was in itself an education of the highest value for the career he proposed to pursue. When he was about thirty years of age he began to acquire a certain reputation as the author of pamphlets directed against some of the pet doctrines of old-fashioned statesmanship, the balance of power in Europe, the necessity of maintaining a state church in Ireland, the importance of allowing no European quarrel to go on without England's intervention, and similar dogmas. Mr. Cobden's opinions then were very much as they continued to the day of his death. He seemed to have come to the maturity of his convictions all at once and to have passed through no further stage either of growth or of decay. But whatever might be said then or now of the doctrines he maintained, there could be only one opinion as to the skill and force which upheld them with pen as well as tongue. The tongue, however, was his best weapon. If oratory were a business and not an art, that is, if its test were its success rather than its form, then it might be contended reasonably enough that Mr. Cobden was one of the greatest orators England has ever known. Nothing could exceed the persuasiveness of his style. His manner was simple, sweet, and earnest. It was persuasive, but it had not the sort of persuasiveness which is merely a better kind of plausibility. It persuaded by convincing. It was transparently sincere. The light of its convictions shone all through it. It aimed at the reason and the judgment of the listener and seemed to be convincing him to his own interest against his prejudices. Cobden's style was almost exclusively conversational, but he had a clear well-toned voice with a quiet unassuming power in it which enabled him to make his words heard distinctly and without effort all through the great meetings he had often to address. His speeches were full of variety. He illustrated every argument by something drawn from his personal observation or from reading, and his illustrations were always striking, appropriate, and interesting. He had a large amount of bright and winning humor, and he spoke the simplest and purest English. He never used an unnecessary sentence or failed for a single moment to make his meaning clear. Many strong opponents of Mr. Cobden's opinions confessed even during his lifetime that they sometimes found with this may their most cherished convictions crumbling away beneath his flow of easy argument. In the stormy times of national passion Mr. Cobden was less powerful. When the question was won to be settled by the rules that govern men's substantial interests, or even by the standing rules of such an expression may be allowed of morality, then Cobden was unequaled. So long as the controversy could be settled after this fashion, I will show you that in such a course you are acting injuriously to your own interests, or you are doing what a fair and just man ought not to do, so long as argument of that kind could sway the conduct of men, then there was no one who could convince as Cobden could. But when the hour and mood of passion came and a man or a nation said, I do not care any longer whether this is for my interest or not, I don't care whether you call it right or wrong, this way my instincts drive me, and this way I am going. Then Mr. Cobden's teaching, the very perfection as it was of common sense and fair play, was out of season. It could not answer feeling with feeling. It was not able to over crow in the word of Shakespeare and Spencer, one emotion by another. The defect of Mr. Cobden's style of mind and temper is fitly illustrated in the deficiency of his method of argument. This sort of education, his modes of observation, his way of turning travel to account, all went together to make him the man he was. The apostle of common sense and fair dealing he had no sympathy with the passions of men. He did not understand them. They passed for nothing in his calculations. His judgment of men and of nations was based far too much on his knowledge of his own motives and character. He knew that in any given case he could always trust himself to act the part of a just and prudent man, and he assumed that all the world could be governed by the rules of prudence and of equity. History had little interest for him, except as it testified to man's advancement and steady progress, and furnished arguments to show that men prospered by liberty, peace and just dealings with their neighbors. He cared little or nothing for mere sentiments. Even where these had their root in some human tendency that was noble in itself, he did not reverence them if they seemed to stand in the way of men's acting peacefully and prudently. He did not see why the mere idea of nationality, for example, should induce people to disturb themselves by insurrections and wars so long as they were tolerably well governed and allowed to exist in peace and to make an honest living. Thus he never represented more than half the English character. He was always out of sympathy with his countrymen on some great political question. But he seemed as if he were designed by nature to conduct to success such an agitation as that against the Corn Laws. He found some colleagues who were worthy of him. His chief companion in the campaign was Mr. Bright. Mr. Bright's fame is not so completely bound up with the repeal of the Corn Laws or even with the extension of the suffrage as that of Mr. Cobden. If Mr. Bright had been on the wrong side of every cause he pleaded, if his agitation had been as conspicuous for failure as it was for success, he would still be famous among English public men. He was what Mr. Cobden was not, an orator of the very highest class. It is doubtful whether English public life has ever produced a man who possessed more of the qualifications of a great orator than Mr. Bright. He had a commanding presence, not indeed the stately and colossal form of O'Connell, but a massive figure, a large head, a handsome and expressive face. His voice was powerful, resonant, clear, with a peculiar vibration in it, which lent unspeakable effect to any passages of pathos or of scorn. His style of speaking was exactly what a conventional demagogues ought not to be. It was pure to austerity. It was stripped of all superfluous ornament. It never gushed or foamed. It never allowed itself to be mastered by passion. The first peculiarity that struck the listener was its superb self-restraint. The orator at his most powerful passages appeared as if he were rather keeping in his strength than taxing it with effort. His voice was for the most part calm and measured. He hardly ever indulged in much gesticulation. He never under the pressure of whatever emotion shouted or stormed. The fire of his eloquence was a white heat, intense, consuming, but never sparkling or sputtering. He had an admirable gift of humor and a keen, ironical power. He had read few books, but of those he read he was a master. The English Bible and Milton were his chief studies. His style was probably formed for the most part on the Bible, for although he may have molded his general way of thinking and his simple, strong morality on the lessons he found in Milton, his mere language bore little trace of Milton's stately classicism with its Hellenized and Latinized terminology, but was above all things saxon and simple. Bright was a man of the middle class. His family were Quakers of a somewhat austere mold. They were manufacturers of carpets and Rochdale Lancashire and had made considerable money in their business. One bright, therefore, was raised above the temptations which often beset the eloquent young man who takes up a democratic cause in a country like ours, and as our public opinion goes, it probably was to his advantage when first he made his appearance in Parliament, that he was well known to be a man of some means and not a clever and needy adventurer. End of Section 32 Section 33 of a history of our own times, Volume 1 by Justin McCarthy. This LibriVox recording is in the public domain, recording by Pamela Nagami. Chapter 14 Free Trade and the League, Part 2 Mr. Bright himself has given an interesting account of his first meeting with Mr. Cobden. The first time I became acquainted with Mr. Cobden was in connection with the great question of education. I went over to Manchester to call upon him and invite him to come to Rochdale to speak at a meeting about to be held in the schoolroom of the Baptist Chapel in West Street. I found him in his counting-house. I told him what I wanted. His countenance lighted up with pleasure to find that others were working in the same cause. He, without hesitation, agreed to come. He came, and he spoke, and though he was then so young a speaker, yet the qualities of his speech were such as remained with him so long as he was able to speak at all. Clearness, logic, a conversational eloquence, a persuasiveness, which when combined with the absolute truth there was in his eye and in his countenance became a power it was almost impossible to resist. Still more remarkable is the description Mr. Bright has given of Cobden's first appeal to him to join in the agitation for the repeal of the corn laws. I was in Leamington, and Mr. Cobden called on me. I was then in the depths of grief. I may almost say of despair, for the light and sunshine of my house had been extinguished. All that was left on earth of my young wife, except the memory of a sainted life and a too brief happiness, was lying still and cold in the chamber above us. Mr. Cobden called on me as his friend and addressed me as you may suppose with words of condolence. After a time he looked up and said, There are thousands and thousands of homes in England at this moment, where wives and mothers and children are dying of hunger. Now when the first paroxysm of your grief is past, I would advise you to come with me, and we will never rest until the corn laws are repealed. The invitation thus given was cordially accepted, and from that time dates the almost unique fellowship of these two men, who work together in the closest brotherhood, who loved each other as not all brothers do, who were associated so closely in the public mind that until Cobden's death the name of one was scarcely ever mentioned without that of the other. There was something positively romantic about their mutual attachment. Each led a noble life, and each was in his own way a man of genius. Each was simple and strong. Rivalry between them would have been impossible, although they were every day being compared and contrasted by both friendly and unfriendly critics. Their gifts were admirably suited to make them powerful allies. Each had something that the other wanted. Bright had not Cobden's winning persuasiveness nor his surprising ease and force of argument. But Cobden had not anything like his companion's oratorical power. He had not the tones of scorn, of pathos, of humor and of passion. The two together made a genuine power in the House of Commons and on the Platform. Mr. Kinglake, who is as little in sympathy with the general political opinions of Cobden and Bright as any man could well be, has borne admirable testimony to their argumentative power and to their influence over the House of Commons. These two orators had shown with what a strength, with what a masterly skill, with what patience, with what a high courage they could carry a scientific truth through the storms of politics. They had shown that they could arouse and govern the ascending thousands who listened to them with delight, that they could bend the House of Commons, that they could press their creed upon a prime minister and put upon his mind so hard a stress that after a while he felt it to be a torture and a violence to his reason to have to make a stand against them. Any more. Each of these gifted men had proved that he could go bravely into the midst of angry opponents, could show them their fallacies one by one, destroy their favorite theories before their very faces and triumphantly argue them down. It was indeed a scientific truth which in the first instance Cobden and Bright undertook to force upon the recognition of a parliament composed, in great measure, of the very men who were taught to believe that their own personal and class interests were bound up with the maintenance of the existing economical creed. Those who hold that because it was a scientific truth the task of its advocates ought to have been easy will do well to observe the success of the resistance which has been thus far offered to it in almost every country but England alone. These men had many assistants and lieutenants well worthy to act with them and under them. Mr. W. J. Fox, for instance, the unitary administer of great popularity and remarkable eloquence, seemed at one time about to divide public admiration as an orator between Mr. Cobden and Mr. Bright. Mr. Milner Gibson, who had been a Tory, went over to the movement and gave it the assistance of a trained parliamentary knowledge and a very considerable debating skill. In the Lancashire towns the League had the advantage of being officered for the most part by shrewd and sound men of business, who gave their time as freely as they gave their money to the advancement of the cause. It is curious to compare the manner in which the anti-corn law agitation was conducted with the manner in which the contemporary agitation in Ireland for repeal of the Union was carried on. In England the agitation was based on the most strictly business principles. The leaders spoke and acted as if the League itself were some great commercial firm which was bound above all things to fulfill its promises and keep to the letter as well as the spirit of its engagements. There was no boasting, there was no exaggeration, there were no appeals to passion, no romantic rousings of sentimental emotion. The system of the agitation was as clear, straightforward and businesslike as its purpose. In Ireland there were monster meetings with all manner of dramatic and theatric effects, with rhetorical exaggeration and vehement appeal to passion and to ancient memory of suffering. The cause was kept up from day to day by assurances of near success so positive that it is sometimes hard to believe those who made them could themselves have been deceived by them. No doubt the differences will be described by many as the mere result of the difference between one cause and the other, between the agitation for free trade, clear, tangible and practical, and that for repeal of the union with its shadowy object and its visionary impulses, but a better explanation of the differences will be found in the different natures to which an appeal had to be made. It is not by any means certain that O'Connell's cause was a mere shadow, nor will it appear if we study the criticism of the time that the guides of public opinion, who pronounced the repeal agitation absurd and ludicrous, had any better words at first for the movement against the corn laws. Compton and Bright on the one side, O'Connell on the other, knew the audiences they had to address. It would have been impossible to stir the blood of the Lancashire artisans by means of the appeals which went to the heart of the dreamy, sentimental and passionate kelp of the south of Ireland. A monster peasant would have understood little of such clear penetrating business-like argument as that by which Compton and Bright enforced their doctrines. Had O'Connell's cause been as practical in its success, been as immediately attainable as that of the anti-corn law league, the great Irish agitator would still have had to address his followers in a different tone of appeal. All men are not alike, says the Norman butler to the Flemish soldier in Scots betrothed, that which will but warm your Flemish hearts will put wildfire into Norman brains, and what may only encourage your countrymen to man the walls will make ours fly over the battlements. The most impassioned kelp, however, will admit that in the anti-corn law movement of Compton and Bright, with its rigid truthfulness and its strict proportion between capacity and promise, there was an entirely new dignity lent to popular agitation, which raised it to the condition of statesmanship in the rough. The reform agitation in England had not been conducted without some exaggeration, much appeal to passion, and some not by any means indistinct allusion to the reserve of popular force, which might be called into action if legislators and peers proved insensible to argument. The era of the anti-corn law movement was a new epoch altogether in English political controversy. The League however successful as it might be throughout the country had its great work to do in Parliament. The free trade leaders must have found their hearts sink within them when they came sometimes to confront the fortress of traditions and of vested rights. Even after the change made in favour of manufacturing and middle class interests by the reform bill, the House of Commons was still composed as to nine-tenths of its whole number by representatives of the landlords. The entire House of Lords then was constituted of the owners of land. All tradition, all prestige, all the dignity of aristocratic institutions seemed to be naturally arrayed against the new movement conducted as it was by manufacturers and traders for the benefits seemingly of trade and those whom it employed. The artisan population who might have been formidable as a disturbing element who were on the whole rather against the free traders than for them. Nearly all the great official leaders had to be converted to the doctrines of free trade. Many of the Whigs were willing enough to admit the case of free trade as the young Scotch lady mentioned by Sidney Smith admitted the case of love in the abstract, but they could not recognise the possibility of applying it in the complicated financial conditions of an artificial system like ours. Some of the Whigs were in favour of a fixed duty in place of the existing sliding scale. The leaders of the movement had indeed to resist a very dangerous temptation coming from statesmen who professed to be in accordance with them as to the mere principle of protection but who were always endeavouring to persuade them that they had better accept any decent compromise and not push their demands to extremes. The witty peer, who in a former generation answered an advocate of moderate reform by asking him what he thought of moderate chastity might have had many opportunities if he had been engaged in the free trade movement of turning his epigram to account. Mr. Macaulay, for instance, wrote to the electors of Edinburgh to remonstrate with them on what he considered their fanatical and uncompromising adherence to the principle of free trade. In my opinion, Mr. Macaulay wrote to his constituents, You are all wrong. Not because you think all protection bad, for I think so too. Not even because you avow your opinion in an attempt to propagate it, for I have always done the same and shall do the same. But because, being in a situation where your only hope is in a compromise, you refuse to hear of compromise. Because being in a situation where every person who will go a step with you on the right road ought to be cordially welcomed, you drive from you those who are willing and desirous to go with you halfway. To this policy I will be no party. I will not abandon those with whom I have hitherto acted and without whose help I am confident that no great improvement can be affected for an object purely selfish. It had not occurred to Mr. Macaulay that any party but the wigs could bring in any measure of fiscal or other reform worth the having, and indeed he probably thought it would be something like an act of ingratitude amounting to a species of sacrilege to accept reform from any hands but those of its recognized wig patrons. The anti-corn law agitation introduced a game of politics into England which astonished and considerably discomfited steady going politicians like Macaulay. The League men did not profess to be bound by any indifusible bond of allegiance to the wig party. They were prepared to cooperate with any party whatever which would undertake to abolish the corn laws. Their agitation would have done some good in this way if in no other sense. It introduced a more robust and independent spirit into political life. It is almost ludicrous sometimes to read the die tribes of supporters of Lord Melbourne's government, for example, against anyone who should presume to think that any object in the mind of a true patriot or at least of a true liberal could equal in importance that of keeping the Melbourne ministry in power. Great reforms have been made by conservative governments in our own days because the new political temper which was growing up in England refused to affirm that the patent of reform rested in the possession of any particular party, that if holders of the monopoly did not find it convenient or were not in the humor to use it any further just then, no one else must venture to interfere in the matter or to undertake the duty which they had declined to perform. At the time that Macaulay wrote his letter, however, it had not entered into the mind of any wig to believe it possible, that the repeal of the Corn Laws was to be the work of a great conservative minister done at the bidding of two radical politicians. It is a significant fact that the anti-Corn Law League were not in the least discouraged by the accession of Sir Robert Peel to power. To them the fixed duty proposed by Lord John Russell was as objectionable as Peel's sliding scale. Their hopes seemed rather to have gone up than gone down when the minister came into power whose adherents, unlike those of Lord John Russell, were absolutely against the very principle of free trade. It is of some importance in estimating the morality of the course pursued by Peel to observe the opinion formed of his professions and his probable purposes by the shrewd men who led the anti-Corn Law League. The grand charge against Peel is that he betrayed his party, that he induced them to continue their allegiance to him on the promise that he would never concede the principle of free trade and that he used his power to establish free trade when the time came to choose between it and a surrender of office. Now it is certain that the league always regarded Sir Robert Peel as a free trader in heart as one who fully admitted the principle of free trade but who did not see his way just then to deprive the agricultural interest of the protection on which they had for so many years been allowed and encouraged to lean. In the debate after the general election of 1841, the debate which turned out the Melbourne Ministry, Mr. Cobden then for the first time a member of the House of Commons said, I am a free trader. I call myself neither Wig nor Tory. I am proud to acknowledge the virtue of the Wig ministry in coming out from the ranks of the monopolists and advancing three parts out of four in my own direction. Yet if the right honourable baronet opposite, Sir Robert Peel, advances one step further, I will be the first to meet him halfway and shake hands with him. Some years later Mr. Cobden said at Birmingham, there can be no doubt that Sir Robert Peel is at heart as good a free trader as I am. He is told as so in the House of Commons again and again, nor do I doubt that Sir Robert Peel has in his inmost heart the desire to be the man who shall carry out the principles of free trade in this country. Sir Robert Peel had indeed, as Mr. Cobden said, again and again in Parliament expressed his conviction as to the general truth of the principles of free trade. In 1842 he declared it to be utterly beyond the power of Parliament and a mere delusion to say that by any duty fixed or otherwise a certain price could be guaranteed to the producer. In the same year he expressed his belief that on the general principle of free trade there is now no great difference of opinion and that all agree in the general rule that we should buy in the cheapest and sell in the dearest market. This expression of opinion called forth an ironical cheer from the benches of opposition. Peel knew well what the cheer was meant to convey. He knew it meant to ask him why then he did not allow the country to buy its grain in the cheapest market. He promptly added, I know the meaning of that cheer. I do not wish to raise a discussion on the corn laws or the sugar duties, which I contend, however, are exceptions to the general rule, and I will not go into that question now. The press of the day, whether for or against Peel, commented upon his declarations and his measures as indicating clearly that the bent of his mind was toward free trade even in grain. At any events he had reached that mental condition when he regarded the case of grain like that of sugar as a necessary exception for the time to the operation of a general rule. It ought to have been obvious that if exceptional circumstances should arise, pulling more strongly in the direction of the league, Sir Robert Peel's own explicit declarations must bind him to recognize the necessity of applying the free trade principles even to corn. Sir Robert Peel, says his cousin Sir Lawrence Peel in a sketch of the life and character of the great statesman, had been, as I have said, always a free trader. The questions to which he had declined to apply these principles had been viewed by him as exceptional. The corn law had been so treated by many able exponents of the principles of free trade. Sir Robert Peel himself has left it on record that during the discussions on the corn law of 1842 he was more than once pressed to give a guarantee, so far as a minister could give it, that the amount of protection established by that law should be permanently adhered to. But although I did not then contemplate the necessity for further change, I uniformly refused to fetter the discretion of the government by any such assurances as those that were required of me. It is evident that the condition of Sir Robert Peel's opinions were even as far back as 1842, something very different indeed from that of the ordinary county member or pledged protectionist, and that Peel had done all he could to make this clear to his party. A minister who in 1842 refused to fetter the discretion of his government in dealing with the protection of homegrown grain, ought not, on the face of things, to be accused of violating his pledges and betraying his party, if four years later, under the pressure of extraordinary circumstances, he made up his mind to the abolition of such a protection. Let us test this in a manner which will be familiar to our own time. Suppose a prime minister is pressed by some of his own party to give the House of Commons a guarantee, so far as a minister could give it, that the principle of the state-church establishment in England shall be permanently adhered to. He declines to fetter the discretion of the government in the future. Is it not evident that such an answer would be taken by nine out of ten of his listeners to be ominous of some change to the established church? If four years after the same minister were to propose to disestablish the church, he might be denounced, and he might even be execrated, but no one could fairly accuse him of having violated his pledge and betrayed his party. The country party, however, did not understand Sir Robert Peel as their opponents and his assuredly understood him. They did not, at this time, believe in the possibility of any change. Free trade was to them little more than an abstraction. They did not much care who preached it out of parliament. They were convinced that the state of things they saw around them when they were boys would continue to the end. They looked on Mr. Villiers and his annual motion in favour of free trade, very much as a stout old Tory of later times might regard the annual motion for woman's suffrage. Both parties in the House, that is to say both of the parties from whom ministers were taken, alike set themselves against the introduction of any such measure. The supporters of it were, with one exception, not men of family and rank. It was agitated for a good deal out of doors, but agitation had not up to that time succeeded in making much way even with a reformed parliament. The country party observed that some men among the two leading sets went farther in favour of the abstract principle than others, but it did not seem to them that that really affected the practical question very much. In 1842 Mr. Disraeli himself was one of those who stood up for the free trade principle and insisted that it had been rather the inherited principle of the conservatives than of the Whigs. Country gentlemen did not therefore greatly concern themselves about the practical work doing in Manchester, or the professions of abstract opinions so often made in parliament. They did not see that the mind of their leader was avowedly in a progressive condition on the subject of free trade. Because they could not bring themselves to question for a moment the principle of protection for homegrown grain, they made up their minds that it was a principle as sacred with him. Against that conviction no evidence could prevail. It was with them a point of conscience and honour. It would have seemed an insult to their leader to believe even his own words if these seemed to say that it was a mere question of expediency, convenience, and time with him. Perhaps it would have been better if Sir Robert Peel had devoted himself more directly to what Mr. Disraeli afterwards called educating his party. Perhaps if he had made it part of his duty as a leader to prepare the minds of his followers for the fact that protection for grain, having ceased to be tenable as an economic principle, would possibly someday have to be given up as a practice he might have taken his party along with him. He might have been able to show them, as the events have shown them since, that the introduction of free corn would be a blessing to the population of England in general and would do nothing but good for the landed interest as well. The influence of Peel at that time and indeed all through his administration up to the introduction of his free trade measures was limitless so far as his party were concerned. He could have done anything with them. Indeed, we find no evidence so clear to prove that Peel had not in 1842 made up his mind to the introduction of free trade as the fact that he did not at once begin to educate his party to it. This is to be regretted. The measure might have been passed by common accord. There is something not altogether without pathetic influence in the thought of that country party whom Peel had led so long and who adored him so thoroughly, turning away from him and against him and mournfully seeking another leader. There is something pathetic in the thought that rightly or wrongly they should have believed themselves betrayed by their chief. But Peel to begin with was a reserved, cold and somewhat awkward man. He was not effusive. He did not pour out his emotions and reveal all his changes of opinion and bursts of confidence even to his habitual associates. He brooded over these things in his own mind. He gave such expression to them an open debate as any passing occasion seems strictly to call for, and he assumed, perhaps, that the gradual changes operating in his views, when thus expressed, were understood by his followers. Above all it is probable that Peel himself did not see until almost the last moment, that the time had actually come when the principle of protection must give way to other and more weighty claims. In his speech announcing his intended legislation in 1846 Sir Robert Peel with a proud frankness which was characteristic of him, denied that his altered course of action was due exclusively to the failure of the potato crop and the dread of famine in Ireland. I will not, he said, withhold the homage which is due to the progress of reason and of truth by denying that my opinions on the subject of protection have undergone a change, and I will not direct the course of the vessel by observations taken in 1842. However it is probable that if the Irish famine had not threatened, the moment for introducing the new legislation might have been indefinitely postponed. The prospects of the anti-corn law league did not look by any means bright when the session preceding the introduction of the free trade legislation came to an end. The number of votes that the league could count on in parliament did not much exceed that which the advocates of home rule have been able to reckon up an hour day. Nothing in 1843 or in the earlier part of 1845 pointed to any immediate necessity for Sir Robert Peel's testing the progress of his own convictions by reducing them into the shape of practical action. It is therefore not hard to understand how even a far-seeing and conscientious statesman, busy with the practical work of each day might have put off taking definite counsel with himself as to the introduction of measures, for which just then there seemed no special necessity and which could hardly be introduced without bitter controversy. CHAPTER XV We see how the two great parties of the state stood with regard to this question of free trade. The Whigs were steadily gravitating toward it. Their leaders did not see their way to accept it as a principle of practical statesmanship, but it was evident that their acceptance of it was only a question of time and of no long time. The leader of the Tory Party was being drawn day by day more in the same direction. Both leaders, Russell and Peel, had gone as far as to admit the general principles of free trade. Peel had contended that grain was in England a necessary exception. Russell was not of opinion that the time had come when it could be treated otherwise than as an exception. The free trade party, small indeed in its parliamentary force but daily growing more and more powerful with the country, would take nothing from either leader but free trade, saufras, and would take that from either leader without regard to partisan considerations. It is evident to anyone who knows anything of the working of our system of government by party that this must soon have ended in one or other of the two great ruling parties forming an alliance with the free traders. If unforeseen events had not interposed it is probable that conviction would first have fastened on the minds of the Whigs and that they would have had the honour of abolishing the Corn Laws. They were out of office and did not seem likely to get back soon to it by their own power and the free trade party would have come in time to be a very desirable ally. It would be idle to pretend to doubt that the convictions of political parties are hastened on a good deal under our system by the yearning of those who are out of office to get the better of those who are in. Statesmen in England are converted as Henry of Navarre became Catholic. We do not say that they actually changed their opinions for the sake of making themselves eligible for power, but a change which has been growing up imperceptibly and which might otherwise have taken a long time to declare itself is stimulated thus to confess itself and come out into the light. But in the case of the anti-Corn Law agitation an event over which political parties had no control intervened to spur the intent of the Prime Minister. Mr Bright many years after when pronouncing the eulogy of his dead friend Cobden described what happened in a fine sentence, famine itself against which we had warred joined us. In the autumn of 1845 the potato rot began in Ireland. The vast majority of the working population of Ireland were known to depend absolutely on the potato for subsistence. In the northern province where the population were of scotch extraction the oatmeal, the bros of their ancestors, still supplied the staple of their food. But in southern and western provinces a large proportion of the peasantry actually lived on the potato and the potato alone. In these districts whole generations grew up, lived, married and passed away without having ever tasted flesh meat. It was evident then that a failure in the potato crop would be equivalent to famine. Many of the labouring class received little or no money wages. They lived on what was called the cottage or tenant system. That is to say a man worked for a landowner on condition of getting the use of a little scrap of land for himself on which to grow potatoes to be the sole food of himself and his family. The news came in the autumn of 1845 that the long continuance of sunless, wet and cold had imperiled if not already destroyed the food of a people. The cabinet of Sir Robert Peale held hasty meetings closely following each other. People began to ask whether Parliament was about to be called together and whether the government had resolved on a bold policy. The anti-corn law league were clamoring for the opening of the ports. The Prime Minister himself was strongly in favour of such a course. He urged upon his colleagues that all restrictions upon the importation of foreign corn should be suspended either by an order in council or by calling Parliament together and recommending such a measure from the throne. It is now known that in offering his advice to his colleagues, Peale accompanied with it the expression of a doubt as to whether it would ever be possible to restore the restrictions that had once been suspended. Indeed, this doubt must have filled every mind. The league was openly declaring that one reason why they called for the opening of the ports was that once opened they never could be closed again. The doubt was enough for some of the colleagues of Sir Robert Peale. It seems marvellous now how responsible statesmen could struggle for the retention of restrictions which were so unpopular and indefensible that if they were once suspended under the pressure of no matter what exceptional necessity they never could be reimposed. The Duke of Wellington and Lord Stanley, however, opposed the idea of opening the ports and the proposal fell through. The cabinet merely resolved on appointing a commission consisting of the heads of departments in Ireland to take some steps to guard against a sudden outbreak of famine, and the thought of an autumnal session was abandoned. Sir Robert Peale himself has thus tersely described the manner in which his proposals were received. The cabinet, by a very considerable majority, declined giving its assent to the proposals which I thus made to them. They were supported by only three members of the cabinet, the Earl of Aberdeen, Sir James Graham, and Sir Sidney Herbert. The other members of the cabinet, some on the ground of objection to the principle of the measures recommended, others upon the ground that there was not yet sufficient evidence of the necessity for them, withheld their sanction. The great cry all through Ireland was for opening of the ports. The Mansion House Relief Committee of Dublin issued a series of resolutions declaring their conviction, from the most undeniable evidence, that considerably more than one-third of the entire potato crop in Ireland had been already destroyed by the disease, and that the disease had not ceased its ravages, but on the contrary was daily expanding more and more. No reasonable conjecture can be formed, the resolutions went on to state, with respect to the limit of its effects short of the destruction of the entire remaining crop, and the document concluded with the denunciation of the Ministry for not opening the ports or calling Parliament together before the usual time for its assembling. Two or three days after the issue of these resolutions, Lord John Russell wrote a letter from Edinburgh to his constituents, the electors of the City of London, a letter which is one of the historical documents of the reign. It announced his unqualified conversion to the principles of the Antichorn Law League. The failure of the potato crop was, of course, the immediate occasion of this letter. In decision and procrastination, Lord John Russell wrote, may produce a state of suffering which it is frightful to contemplate. It is no longer worthwhile to contend for a fixed duty. In 1841 the Free Trade Party would have agreed to a duty of eight shillings per quarter on wheat, and after a lapse of years this duty might have been further reduced and ultimately abolished. But the imposition of any duty at present, without a provision for its extinction within a short period, would but prolong a contest already sufficiently fruitful of animosity and discontent. Lord John Russell then invited a general understanding to put an end to his system, which has been proved to be the blight of commerce, the bane of agriculture, the source of bitter division among classes, the cause of penury, fever, mortality, and crime among the people. Then the writer added a significant remark to the effect that the government appeared to be waiting for some excuse to give up the present Corn Laws and urging the people to afford them all the excuse they could desire, by petition, by address, by remonstrance. Peel himself has told us in his memoirs what was the effect which this letter produced upon his own counsels. It could not, he points out, fail to exercise a very material influence on the public mind and on the subject matter of our deliberations in the Cabinet. It justified the conclusion that the Whig Party was prepared to unite with the Anti-Corn Law League in demanding the total repeal of the Corn Laws. Peel would not consent now to propose simply an opening of the ports. It would seem he thought a mere submission to accept the minimum of the terms ordered by the Whig Leader. That would have been well enough when he first recommended it to his Cabinet, and if it could have then been offered to the country as the spontaneous movement of a united ministry it would have been becoming of the emergency and of the men. But to do this now would be futile, would seem like trifling with the question. Sir Robert Peel therefore recommended to his Cabinet an early meeting of Parliament with the view of bringing forward some measure equivalent to a speedy repeal of the Corn Laws. The recommendation was wise. It was indeed indispensable, yet it is hard to think that an impartial posterity will form a very lofty estimate of the wisdom with which the councils of two great English parties were guided in this momentous emergency. Neither Whigs nor Tories appear to have formed a judgment because of facts or principles, but only in deference to the political necessities of the hour. Sir Robert Peel himself denied that it was the resistless hand of famine in Ireland which had brought him to his resolve that the Corn Laws ought to be abolished. He grew into the conviction that they were bad in principle. Lord John Russell had long been growing into the same conviction, yet the League had been left to divide with but small numbers against overwhelming majorities made up of both parties until the very session before Peel proposed to repeal the Corn Laws. Lord Beckinsfield indeed indulges in something like exaggeration when he says in his Life of Lord George Bentinck that the close of the session of 1845 found the League nearly reduced to silence. But it is not untrue that, as he says, the Manchester Confederates seemed to be least in favour with Parliament and the country on the very eve of their triumph. They lost at the same time elections in the ear of the House, and the cause of total and immediate repeal seemed in a not less hopeless position than when under circumstances of infinite difficulty it was first and solely upheld by the terse eloquence and vivid perception of Charles Villiers. Lord Beckinsfield certainly ought to know what cause had and what had not the ear of the House of Commons at that time, and yet we ventured to doubt even after his assurance whether the League and its speakers had in any way found their hold on the attention of Parliament diminishing. But the loss of elections is beyond dispute. It is a fact alluded to in the very letter from Lord John Russell which was creating so much commotion. It is not to be denied, Lord John Russell writes, that many elections for cities and towns in 1841 and some in 1845 appear to favour the assertion that free trade is not popular with the great mass of the community. This is from whatever cause a very common phenomenon in our political history. A movement which began with the promise of sweeping all before it seems after a while to lose its force and is supposed by many observers to be now only the work and the care of a few earnest and fanatical men. Suddenly it is taken up by a minister of commanding influence and the bore or the crotchet of one Parliament is the great party controversy of the second and the accomplished triumph of the third. In this instance it is beyond dispute that the League seemed to be somewhat losing in strength and influence just on the eve of its complete triumph. He must indeed be the very optimist of Parliamentary government who upholds the manner of free trade's final adoption as absolutely satisfactory and as reflecting nothing but credit upon the councils of our two great political parties. Such a well-contented personage might be fairly asked to explain why a system of protective taxation, beginning to be regarded by all thoughtful statesmen as bad in itself, should never be examined with a view to its repeal, until the force of a great emergency and the rival biddings of party leaders came to render its repeal inevitable. The Corn Laws, as all the world now admits, were a cruel burden to the poor and the working class of England. They were justly described by Lord John Russell as the blight of commerce, the bane of agriculture, the source of bitter division among classes, the cause of penury, fever, mortality and crime among the people. All this was independent of the sudden and ephemeral calamity of the potato rot, which at the time when Lord John Russell wrote that letter did not threaten to become nearly so fatal as it afterwards proved to be. One cannot help asking how long would the Corn Laws have been suffered thus to blight commerce and agriculture, to cause division among classes and to produce penury, mortality and crime among the people, if the potato rot in Ireland had not rendered it necessary to do something without delay. The potato rot, however, inspired the writing of Lord John Russell's letter, and Lord John Russell's letter inspired Sir Robert Peel with the conviction that something must be done. Most of his colleagues were inclined to go with him this time. A cabinet council was held on November 25, almost immediately after the publication of Lord John Russell's letter. At that council Sir Robert Peel recommended the summoning of Parliament with a view to instant measures to combat the famine in Ireland, but with a view also to some announcement of legislation intended to pave the way for the repeal of the Corn Laws. Lord Stanley still hesitated and asked time to consider his decision. The Duke of Wellington was unchanged in his private opinion that the Corn Laws ought to be maintained. But he declared with a blunt simplicity that his only object in public life was to support Sir Robert Peel's administration of the Government for the Queen. A good government for the country, said the sturdy and simple old hero, is more important than Corn Laws or any other consideration. One may smile at this notion of a good government without reference to the quality of the legislation and introduces, it reminds one a little of the celebrated study of history without reference to time or place. But the Duke acted strictly up to his principles of duty, and he declared that if Sir Robert Peel considered the repeal of the Corn Laws to be not right or necessary for the welfare of England, but requisite for the maintenance of Sir Robert Peel's position in Parliament and in the public view, he should thoroughly support the proposal. Lord Stanley however was not to be changed in the end. He took time to consider, and seems really to have tried his best to persuade himself, that he could fall in with the new position which the Premier had assumed. Meanwhile the most excited condition of public feeling prevailed throughout London and the country generally. The Times newspaper came out on December 4th with the announcement that the Ministry had made up its mind, and that the Royal Speech at the Commencement of the Session would recommend an immediate consideration of the Corn Laws preparatory to their total repeal. It would be hardly possible to exaggerate the excitement caused by this startling piece of news. It was indignantly, and in unqualified terms, declared a falsehood by the ministerial Prince. Long arguments were gone into to prove that even if the fact announced was true, it could not possibly have been known to the Times. In Disraeli's Conningsby Mr. Rigby gives the clearest and most convincing reasons to prove first, that Lord Spencer could not be dead, as reports said he was, and next, that even if he were dead, the fact could not possibly be known to those who took on themselves to announce it. He is hardly silenced even by the assurance of a great duke that he is one of Lord Spencer's executors, and that Lord Spencer is certainly dead. So the announcement in the Times was fiercely and pedantically argued against. It can't be true. The Times could not get to know of it. It must be a Cabinet secret if it were true. Nobody outside the Cabinet could possibly know of it. If anyone outside the Cabinet could get to know of it, it would not be the Times. It would be this or that or the other person or journal and so forth. Long after it had been made certain beyond even Mr. Rigby's power of disputation that the announcement was true so far as the resolve of the Prime Minister was concerned, people continued to argue and controvert as to the manner in which the Times became possessed of the secret. The general conclusion came to among the knowing was that the blandishments of a gifted and beautiful lady with a dash of political intrigue in her had somehow extorted the secret from a young and handsome member of the Cabinet, and that she had communicated it to the Times. It is not impossible that this may have been the true explanation. It was believed in by a great many persons who might have been in a position to judge of the probabilities. On the other hand, there were surely signs and tokens enough by which a shrewd politician might have guessed what was to come without any intervention of petticoat diplomacy. It seems odd now that people should then have distressed themselves so much by conjectures as to the source of the information when once it was made certain that the information itself was substantially true. This it undoubtedly was, although it did not tell all the truth and could not foretell, for there was an ordeal yet to be gone through before the Prime Minister could put his plans into operation. On December 4, the Times made the announcement, on the 6th having been passionately contradicted it repeated the assertion. We adhere to our original announcement that Parliament will meet early in January, and that a repeal of the Corn Laws will be proposed in one house by Sir R. Peel and in the other by the Duke of Wellington. But in the meantime the opposition in the Cabinet had proved itself unmanageable. Lord Stanley and the Duke of Buckley intimated to the Prime Minister that they could not be parties to any measure involving the ultimate repeal of the Corn Laws. Sir Robert Peel did not believe that he could carry out his project satisfactorily under such circumstances, and he therefore hastened to tender his resignation to the Queen. The other members of the Cabinet, without exception, I believe, these are Sir Robert Peel's own words, concurred in this opinion, and under these circumstances I considered it to be my duty to tender my resignation to Her Majesty. On the 5th of December I repaired to Osburn, Isle of Wight, and humbly solicited Her Majesty to relieve me from duties which I felt I could no longer discharge with advantage to Her Majesty's service. The very day after the Times made its famous announcement, the very day before the Times repeated it, the Prime Minister, who was to propose the repeal of the Corn Laws, went out of office. End of Section 34. Section 35 of a History of Our Own Times, Volume 1 by Justin McCarthy. This LibriVox recording is in the public domain. Recording by Pamela Nagami. Chapter 15. Famine Forces Peel's Hand. Part 2. Quame Dixaray Caos. Apparently, chaos had come again. Lord John Russell was sent for from Edinburgh. His letter had, without any such purpose, on his part, written him up as the man to take Sir Robert Peel's place. Lord John Russell came to London and did his best to cope with the many difficulties of the situation. His party was not very strong in the country, and they had not a majority in the House of Commons. He very naturally endeavored to obtain from Peel a pledge that he would support the immediate and complete repeal of the Corn Laws. Peel, writing to the Queen, humbly expresses his regret that he does not feel it to be consistent with his duty to enter upon the consideration of this important question in Parliament, fettered by a previous engagement of the nature of that required of him. The position of Lord John Russell was awkward. He had been forced into it because one or two of Sir Robert Peel's colleagues would not consent to adopt the policy of their chief. But the very fact of so stubborn an opposition from a man of Lord Stanley's influence showed clearly enough that the passing of the free trade measures was not to be affected without stern resistance from the country party. The whole risk and burden had seemingly been thrown on Lord John Russell, and now Sir Robert Peel would not even pledge himself to unconditional support of the very policy which was understood to be his own. Lord John Russell showed even then his characteristic courage. He resolved to form a ministry without a parliamentary majority. He was not, however, fated to try the ordeal. Lord Gray, who was, a few months before, Lord Howick, and who had just succeeded to the title of his father, the stately Charles Earl Gray, the pupil of Fox and chief of the cabinet, which passed the reform bill and abolished slavery, Lord Gray felt a strong objection to the foreign policy of Lord Palmerston, and these two could not get on in one ministry as it was part of Lord John Russell's plan that they should do. Lord Gray also was strongly of opinion that a seat in the cabinet ought to be offered to Mr. Cobden, but other great wigs could not bring themselves to any larger sacrifice to justice and common sense than a suggestion that the office of vice president of the Board of Trade should be tender to the leader of the free trade movement. Mr. McCauley describes the events in a letter to a constituent in Edinburgh. All our plans were frustrated by Lord Gray, who objected to Lord Palmerston being foreign secretary. I hope that the public interests will not suffer. Sir Robert Peale must now undertake the settlement of the question. It is certain that he can settle it. It is by no means certain that we could have done so, for we shall to a man support him and a large proportion of those who are now in office would have refused to support us. One passage in McCauley's letter will be read with peculiar interest. From the first, he says, I told Lord John Russell that I stipulated for one thing only, total and immediate repeal of the corn laws, that my objections to gradual abolition were insurmountable, but that if he declared for total and immediate repeal I would be, as to all other matters absolutely in his hands, that I would take any office or no office just as suited him best, and that he should never be disturbed by any personal pretensions or jealousies on my part. No one can doubt McCauley's sincerity and singleness of purpose, but it is surprising to note the change that the agitation of little more than two years has made in his opinions on the subject of a policy of immediate and unconditional abolition. In February, 1843, he was pointing out to the electors of Edinburgh the unwisdom of refusing a compromise, and in December, 1845, he is writing to Edinburgh to say that the one only thing for which he must stipulate was total and immediate repeal. The anti-corn law league might well be satisfied with the propagandist work they had done. The league itself looked on very compositely during these little altercations and embarrassments of parties. They knew well enough now that let who would take power he must carry out their policy. At a meeting of the league, which was held in Covent Garden Theatre on the seventeenth of this memorable month, and while the negotiations were still going on, Mr. Cobden declared that he and his friends had not striven to keep one party in or another party out of office. We have worked with but one principle and one object in view, and if we maintain that principle for but six months more, we shall attain to that state which I have so long and so anxiously desired, when the league shall be dissolved into its primitive elements by the triumph of its principles. Lord John Russell founded impossible to form a ministry. He signified his failure to the Queen. Probably having done the best he could, he was not particularly distressed to find that his efforts were ineffectual. The Queen had to send for Sir Robert Peel to Windsor and tell him that she must require him to withdraw his resignation and to remain in her service. Sir Robert, of course, could only comply. The Queen offered to give him some time to enter into communication with his colleagues, but Sir Robert very wisely thought that he could speak with much greater authority if he were to invite them to support him in an effort on which he was determined and which he had positively undertaken to make. He therefore returned from Windsor on the evening of December 20th, having resumed all the functions of First Minister of the Crown. The Duke of Buckley withdrew his opposition to the policy which Peel was now to carry out, but Lord Stanley remained firm. The place of the latter was taken as Secretary of State for the colonies by Mr. Gladstone, who, however curiously enough, remained without a seat in Parliament during the eventful session that was now to come. Mr. Gladstone had sat for the borough of Newark, but that borough, being under the influence of the Duke of Newcastle, who had withdrawn his support from the ministry, he did not invite re-election, but remained without a seat in the House of Commons for some months. Sir Robert Peel, then, to use his own words in a letter to the Princess Delifen, resumed power, with greater means of rendering public service than I should have had if I had not relinquished it. He felt, he said, like a man restored to life after his funeral service had been preached. Parliament was summoned to meet in January. In the meantime, it was easily seen how the protectionists and the Tories of the extreme order generally would regard the proposals of Sir Robert Peel. Protectionist meetings were held in various parts of the country, and they were all but unanimous in condemning by anticipation the policy of the restored Premier. Resolutions were passed at many of these meetings expressing an equal disbelief in the Prime Minister and in the Famine. The utmost indignation was expressed at the idea of there being any Famine in prospect which could cause any departure from the principles which secured to the Farmers a certain fixed price for their grain, or at least prevented the price from falling below what they considered a paying amount. Not less absurd than the protestations that there would be no Famine were some of the remedies which were suggested for it if it should insist on coming on. The Duke of Norfolk of that time made himself particularly conspicuous by a beneficent suggestion which he offered to a distressed population. He went about recommending a curry powder of his own device as a charm against hunger. Parliament met. The opening day was January 22, 1846. The Queen in person opened the session, and the speech from the Throne said a good deal about the condition of Ireland and the failure of the potato crop. The speech contained one significant sentence. I have had, Her Majesty was made to say, great satisfaction in giving my assent to the measures which you have presented to me from time to time, calculated to extend commerce and to stimulate domestic skill in industry by the repeal of prohibitive and the relaxation of protective duties. I recommend you to take into your early consideration whether the principle on which you have acted may not with advantage be yet more extensively applied. Before the address and reply to the speech from the Throne was moved, Sir Robert Peale gave notice of the intention of the government on the earliest possible day to submit to the consideration of the House, measures connected with the commercial and financial affairs of the country. There are few scenes more animated and exciting than that presented by the House of Commons on some night when a great debate is expected or when some momentous announcement is to be made. A common thrill seems to tremble all through the assembly as a breath of wind runs across the sea. The House appears for a moment to be one body pervaded by one expectation. The ministerial benches, the front benches of opposition, are occupied by the men of political renown and of historic name. The benches everywhere else are crowded to their utmost capacity. Members who cannot get seats on such an occasion a goodly number stand below the bar or have to dispose themselves along the side galleries. The celebrities are not confined to the treasury benches or those of the leaders of opposition. Here and there among the independent members and below the gangway on both sides are seen men of influence and renown. At the opening of Parliament in 1846 this was especially to be observed. The rising fame of the free trade leaders made them almost like a third great party in the House of Commons. The strangers' gallery, the speaker's gallery, on such a night are crowded to excess. The eye surveys the whole house and sees no vacant place. In the very hum of conversation that runs along the benches there is a tone of profound anxiety. The minister, who has to face that house and make the announcement for which all are waiting in a most feverish anxiety, is a man to be envied by the ambitious. This time there was a curiosity about everything. What was the minister about to announce? When and in what fashion would he announce it? Would the wig leaders speak before the ministerial announcement? Would the free traders? What voice would first hint to the expectant commons the course which political events were destined to take? The moving of an address to the throne is always a formal piece of business. It would be hardly possible for Cicero or Burke to be very interesting when performing such a task. On the other hand it is an excellent chance for a young beginner. He finds the house in a sort of contemptuously indulgent mood, prepared to welcome the slightest evidence of any capacity of speech above the dullest mediocrity. He can hardly say anything absurd or offensive unless he goes absolutely out of his way to make a fool of himself, and on the other hand he can easily say his little nothings in a graceful way and receive grateful applause accordingly from an assembly which counts on being bored and feels doubly indebted to the speaker who is even in the slightest degree an agreeable disappointment. On this particular occasion, however, the duty of the proposer and seconder of the address was made specially trying by the fact that they had to interfere with merely formal utterances between an eager house and an exciting announcement. A certain piquancy was lent, however, to the performance of the duty by the fact which the speeches made evident beyond the possibility of mistake, that the proposer of the address knew quite well what the government was about to do, and that the seconder knew nothing whatever. Now the formal task is done, the address has been moved and seconded, the speaker puts the question that the address be adopted, now is the time for debate if debate there is to be. On such occasions there is always some discussion, but it is commonly as mere a piece of formality as the address itself. It is understood that the leader of opposition will say something meaning next to nothing, that two or three men will grumble vaguely at the ministry, that the leader of the house will reply and then the affair is all over. But on this occasion it was certain that some momentous announcement would have to be made and the question was when it would come. Perhaps no one expected exactly what did happen. Nothing can be more unusual than for the leader of the house to open the debate on such an occasion, and Sir Robert Peel was usually somewhat of a formalist who kept to the regular ways in all that pertain to the business of the house. No eyes of expectation were turned therefore to the ministerial bench at the moment after the formal putting of the question by the speaker. It was rather expected that Lord John Russell or perhaps Mr. Cobden would rise. But a surprised murmur running through all parts of the house soon told those who could not see the treasury bench that something unusual had happened, and in a moment the voice of the Prime Minister was heard. That marvelous voice of which Lord Beckinsfield says that it had not in his time any equal in the house unless we accept the thrilling tones of O'Connell, and it was known that the great explanation was coming at once. The explanation even now, however, was somewhat deferred. The Prime Minister showed a deliberate intention, it might have been thought, not to come to the point at once. He went into long and labored explanations of the manner in which his mind had been brought into a change on the subject of free trade and protection, and he gave exhaustive calculations to show that the reduction of duty was constantly followed by expansion of the revenue and even a maintenance of high prices. The duties on glass, the duties on flax, the prices of salt-pork and domestic lard, the contract price of salt-beef for the navy. These and many other such topics were discussed at great length and with elaborate fullness of detail in the hearing of an eager house anxious only for that night to know whether or not the minister meant to introduce the principle of free trade. Peel, however, made it clear enough that he had become a complete convert to the doctrines of the Manchester School, and that in his opinion the time had come when that protection which he had taken office to maintain must forever be abandoned. One sentence at the close of his speech was made the occasion of much labored criticism and some severe accusation. It was that in which Peel declared that he found it no easy task to ensure the harmonious and united action of an ancient monarchy, a proud aristocracy, and a reformed House of Commons. The explanation was over. The House of Commons was left rather to infer than to understand what the government proposed to do. Lord John Russell entered into some personal explanations relating to his endeavor to form a ministry and the causes of its failure. These have not much interest for a later time. It might have seemed that the work of the night was done. It was evident that the ministerial policy could not be discussed then, for in fact it had not been announced. The House knew that the Prime Minister was a convert to the principles of free trade, but that was all that anyone could be said to know except those who were in the secrets of the cabinet. There appeared nothing for it but to wait until the time should come for the formal announcement and the full discussion of the government measures. Suddenly, however, a new and striking figure intervened in the languishing debate and filled the House of Commons with a fresh life. There is not often to be found in our parliamentary history an example like this of a sudden turn given to a whole career by a timely speech. The member who rose to comment on the explanation of Sir Robert Peale had been for many years in the House of Commons. This was his tenth season. He had spoken often in each session. He had made many bold attempts to win a name in Parliament, and hitherto his political career had been simply a failure. From the hour when he spoke this speech, it was one long, unbroken, brilliant success.