History of the Anti-Corn Law League/Chapter11
CHAPTER XI.
FURTHER MOVEMENT IN 1840.
Mr. Villiers renewed his motion on Tuesday, the 26th of May, after the presentation of petitions against the Corn Laws with a quarter of a million of signatures, in addition to those to which a million and a quarter of names had been attached presented before his last motion. These strong demonstrations of public opinion had no effect on the house. It became manifest, the moment he began to speak, that there was a fixed determination to give neither him nor the petitioners a fair hearing. He was assailed from his outset with a volley of sounds, such as could have been heard in no other deliberative assembly in the world. The Speaker's calls to order were utterly disregarded, and it was not till, losing all patience, he commanded the bar to be cleared and members to take their seats, that the enlightened advocate of free trade could be heard in the gallery. Again did the Babel-like confusion arise, and again had the Speaker occasion, most peremptorily, to assert his authority but even this would have availed nothing, had not the time arrived when the fruges consumere nati usually went to dine, and then, with about a hundred auditors, Mr. Villiers was allowed to proceed without interruption. Lord John Russell asked what the government could do, when a majority of the house was against any alteration of the law? He would vote, he said, for the motion, but not with a view to total repeal, as his own opinion was in favour of a moderate fixed duty. Mr. Strutt followed in favour of repeal, and then the noisy disturbance commenced afresh. The gentlemen born to dine, had, for that night, performed that important function, and they returned, heated with wine and hatred of any invasion of their vested right to put their hands into the pockets of the herd of bread eaters. Mr. Warburton was assailed in the middle of his speech by loud cries of "Divide, divide; " and when Mr. Mark Philips, representing a constituency equal to the aggregate of fifty undisfranchised but still corrupt boroughs, returning seventy-two members, rose to enforce the claims of the most important manufacturing community in her Majesty's dominions, he was greeted with deafening clamour. It was useless to carry on the discussion under such circumstances. The call for a division was acceded to, and the numbers were found to be:—
| Against the motion, | 300 |
| For it | 177 |
Majority in favour of the continuance, unmitigated, of the landowners' monopoly, 123.
The delegates, who had again met in London, renewed their declaration that they would resume their agitation with increased determination to attain their great object, and I had the honour of moving, my heart going heartily with it,a renewal of the pledge that we should use every exertion to obtain the return of those members alone who would vote for the repeal of the Corn Laws.
The division in the House of Commons was on the 26th of May. In my paper, of the 6th of June, I find the following notices of the commencement of the rebellion of the belly in Ireland.
The wonder was that it did not break out sooner:—
My comment at the time was "Repeal the Union! Repeal the Corn Law. That is both the immediate and the permanent remedy It is melancholy to hear this puling cry about a thousand pounds spent at a ball, while millions are taken from the Irish population under the pretence of protection—of protection to Irish agriculture. It is the lament that the farthing is not spent amongst them, while they say nothing of being robbed of the pound! This belly insurrection is the necessary consequence of reducing the people to potatoes as their only food. When wheat is the principal article of consumption, and when is a scarcity of that grain, recourse may be had to barley, oats,and rye, all furnishing comparatively nutritious farina; and when all these are scarce, the potato becomes a useful substitute. But then the Corn Law has raised the price, not merely of wheat, but of all the other corns used in the production of bread, and by shutting out the products of our industry from foreign markets has lessened the demand for labour and lowered its reward; and, as the mass of the people have, by this double process, been reduced to a potato diet, the failure of the potato crop leaves them absolutely without food. This is the present condition of hundreds of thousands in Ireland—in Ireland, supposed to be so especially benefited by the Corn Law—in Ireland, for whose especial benefit legislators tell us that, even if the landowners of Great Britain derived no advantage, the Corn Law should be continued! One cause of the contempt with which the people's petitions were received in the Commons was the belief that the fine weather and the fine appearance of the crops would speedily put an end to Anti-Corn-Law agitation. It was forgotten that the stock of last year's potatoes, the only food of Ireland, might be exhausted before the new crop was ready. The far-seeing legislators overlooked the interval; and the consequence of their oversight is the deliberate sacking of the provision stores of Limerick, by men whose desperation rendered them insensible to all fear. These things take place when corn and flour, to the amount of four or five millions sterling, might, in a few weeks, be had in exchange for the same amount of our manufactured goods." The emphatic warning given by starvation and tumult was thrown away upon the government and the legislature. The population of Ireland was still to subsist on a watery root, and no provision was made for the possible failure of that precarious crop. Was it blindness or utter heartlessness, or grasping avarice, that left eight millions of people to this terrible contingency?
At a meeting of the delegates, in London, a number of agricultural labourers, from different counties, were publicly examined as to their condition, to meet the allegations of the landowners, that, whatever might be the distress amongst the manufacturing population—distress which they attributed to over-production, or any other cause than the real one—the farm labourers were enjoying the benefits of protection to agriculture. By this public examination, reported fully in the newspapers at the time, it was incontrovertibly proved that the wages of the agricultural labourer in the summer were barely sufficient to procure the common necessaries of life; that in winter even those could not be had without aid from private charity or from the parish; that clothes were worn year after year, till the numerous patches entirely covered the original fabric and that their wages did not rise with the rise of the price of food; and that, consequently, their condition was improved in cheap, and greatly deteriorated in dear years. It had been demonstrated that if the Corn Laws had previously raised the price of farm produce, the farmers had paid away in the shape of increased rents the whole of their increased receipts and the proof, widely diffused, by the newspaper press and by the tracts of the League, that the agricultural working class benefited nothing by laws which were passed professedly for their benefit, did much to procure for its lecturers a better reception in the agricultural districts, where landowners and farmers had encouraged their labourers to meet argument by brute force.
Another inquiry was instituted, not so immediately striking, but gradually exciting a wider discussion, and leading to more important results. On the 5th of May, Mr. Hume, more capable of extended prospection than men who regarded him only as a pertinacious worker in economical detail gave him credit for, obtained a select committee of the House of Commons, "To inquire into the several duties levied upon imports into the United Kingdom, and how far those duties are for protection to similar articles, the produce of this country or of the British possessions abroad, or whether the duties are for revenue alone." The opponents of the Corn Laws had protested against a tax of which a small part only found its way into the public revenue, while by much the greater part went into the pockets of a favoured class. Here, then, was a most important inquiry, but it excited little notice at the time. I published in my paper a considerable portion of the evidence, selected for me by Mr. Hume; and even in Manchester, where the bearings of the Corn Law had been carefully studied, few persons took an interest in the investigation. The opening out of this new field is well described in the British Quarterly Review, of May, 1845, from which the following are extracts.:—
"The committee well discharge their task; and in their report and it, presented the country with a body of facts the evidence annexed to it, and opinions of the very highest value to the cause of commercial and industrial freedom. The condemnation of the restrictive system, in all its ramifications, was decisive and complete. Official witnesses, secretaries of the Board of Trade, every way practical men—men possessing means of observation and judgment far superior to those possessed by the leaders of Parliamentary parties—brought their official experience and knowledge to testify to the commercial obstruction, the fiscal exhaustion and embarrassment, the national waste, impoverishment, and suffering inflicted by the various monopolies which we pet and pamper under the name of 'interests,' and to show the vast and unmixed good capable of being realized by national and honest legislation. We regard the evidence given before this committee by Mr. Macgregor, Mr. G. R. Porter, and the late Mr. James Deacon Hume, as constituting one of the most important contributions 'ever made" to the free-trade cause. That such opinions as those expressed by the gentlemen should be the result to which men are led hy years of laborious service in the working department of the Board of Trade, is, to say the least, a most magnificent presumption of the soundness of free-trade principles. Nobody can charge these witnesses with 'theory,' abstraction,' and 'visionary speculation;' and the natural bias of official habit and prejudice would have been in favour of the established system. Yet we find these are the men who are not only the most vigorous and unsparing in their condemnation of the restrictive system, but the boldest in their plans of reform, and the most sanguine and Utopian' in their anticipation of the advantages of every kind—fiscal, commercial, and social—to be reaped by the unreserved and fearless application of the principles of commercial freedom. The evidence, in particular, of Mr. J. D. Hume, 'a gentleman whose loss' Sir Robert Peel 'is sure we must all sincerely deplore'—is especially interesting. It reads like that of a man who had learned to detest most cordially the system in whose administration he had grown grey (he had been forty-nine years at the Customs and at the Board of Trade)—who had long been disgusted and indignant at its injustice, absurdity, wastefulness, and suicidal policy—had bitterly felt his impotence to redress abuses of which every month's additional experience had more clearly shown him the mischievous and destructive qualities—and was delighted, at last, in having an opportunity of throwing off official reserve, and coming out publicly to speak his mind. The labours of this Import Duties Committee form a peculiarly interesting epoch in the history of the free-trade question. Their report was first unheeded, then ridiculed, then angrily denounced. But afterwards it began to be quoted as an authority; and it is already sufficiently clear that its doctrines are eventually destined for the statute-book. It made a "groove" in which the course of our future commercial legislation must inevitably flow. The whig Budget of 1841, was the first fruits of the principles now for the first time placed authoritatively on record before Parliament and the public. Since its rejection we have had two new tariffs more or less leavened with these principles. The very men whom the 'interests' combined to lift into power, expressly for the defence of their monopolies, had no choice but to accept the doctrines of free trade, and of common sense, as heir looms of office.
"The one great principle brought out most distinctly by the Import Duties Committee of 1840—set in the boldest relief by their report, and still more by the official witnesses they examined, and since become thoroughly familiar to the public mind, though yet waiting for its legislative recognition—is the broad generic difference between two sorts of taxes, which have been from time immemorial jumbled together in our tariff, and confirmed by popular ignorance or heedlessness, but are in reality as opposite in their respective natures as light and darkness:—viz., taxes for revenue and taxes for protection; taxes paid into the exchequer in direct money disbursements, and taxes paid to particular individual classes, in the shape of an artificially enhanced price of the commodities in which those individuals or classes deal; in other words, public taxes and private taxes. The difference—rather, the contrariety—between these two sorts of taxes was now brought plainly out before the public eye, in a way intelligible to every child of average capacity, and illustrated with ample variety of practical detail. It was shown that the British Custom House, though nominally one establishment, performs in fact two functions that are not only distinct but contradictory—levying money directly and openly for the public service of the state, and also levying money, indirectly and furtively, to the detriment of the state, for the private pockets of certain favoured individuals and classes. It was likewise shown that the indirect and furtive private taxation, far exceeds in amount the whole sum of the public taxation of the country—rendering, of course, the burden of the public taxes so much the more onerous, and their collection more difficult. Also, that the incidental operation of these private taxes, in diverting capital and industry from their natural channels, limiting trade, relaxing the demand for labour, and abridging remuneration, is beyond measure more mischievous than their pressure as a pecuniary impost. And, moreover, that the individuals and classes for whose supposed benefit these private taxes are levied, are, on the whole and in the long run, nothing the better, but very much the worse, for the oppression and impoverishment of the rest of the community."
A movement of another kind had a like unpromising beginning, and a like result in more widely spreading the doctrines of free trade. The lecturers of the League were diligently employed in various parts of the kingdom, some in the great towns instructing intelligent audiences in the application of the principles of political economy, and others making popular appeals to the working classes in smaller towns and villages. Useful as this agency was, and zealous and able as the lecturers were in their several capacities, it become obvious that another class of labourers were needed in the wide field. When application was made for a free-trade missionary, I suggested that members of the Council of the League should occasionally go forth, and offered myself as a volunteer when we had nobody else to send. In this way I had attended several meetings in my own neighbourhood; and at the meeting of the delegation in London, finding that Mr. Beadon, of Taunton, and several other gentlemen had in like manner visited in towns of their neighbourhood, I strenuously recommended the example to be followed by the delegates in their various localities. In May I was requested by my colleagues of the council to attend a meeting of the Glasgow Anti-Corn-Law Association in that city, and I took the opportunity of urging upon its members the origination of a similar mode of agitation. In the course of the year I attended some ten or a dozen of meetings held in towns near Manchester, and towards its close there was a demand for the services of other members of the council, whose ready eloquence, perfect mastery of the subject, and their influential station in our commercial and manufacturing community, gave weight to their teachings.
On the 30th of November, a crowded meeting was held in Warrington, at which were present, as deputies from their respective Anti-Corn-Law Associations, Mr. Cobden, Mr. W. Eawson, and Mr. John Brooks, of Manchester, and Mr. Lawrence Heyworth, of Liverpool. Amongst the audience were a number of chartists, and their presence gave a turn to the proceedings which was exceedingly encouraging to the friends of the free-trade movement, for it showed that a fearless and uncompromising course of argument, expressed in a conciliatory spirit, would ensure the respect of a body of men, who, in their zeal for the charter, who were apt to forget what was due to others who demanded a more immediately practicable measure of reform. The chairman, Mr. Holbrook Gaskell, introduced the deputation, and then Mr. Rawson made a sensible short speech. Mr. Brooks followed in a mingled strain of good argument and familiar and amusing illustration. Mr. Heyworth characterised the Corn Law as operating to make the poor still poorer, and the rich still richer, and said that the remedy lay in making a proper use of the elective franchise. An intelligent-looking man, named Travis, rose and proposed a resolution, uniting opposition to the Corn Laws with the six points of the charter, but arguing that the repeal of those laws would throw land out of cultivation. Mr. Rawson ably showed the fallacy of Travis' argument, and drew from him the admission that he only opposed repeal as a single measure. Mr. Heyworth said that the manufacturers had no power to prevent the reduction of wages. It was want of work and the consequent competition of unemployed men that reduced wages. Mr. Cobden, of whom my fear had been that he was a little too refined for the rough work of a popular meeting, now gave evidence that he possessed, in the highest degree, the power of arguing to the plainest understanding, and conciliating the most adverse audience. He did not skulk the question but vigorously grappled with it at once, and by a clear explanation of the principles which regulate wages, and an appeal to the experience of all present that their condition was better when food was plentful and cheap, than when it was scarce and dear, carried the whole meeting with him, and when the resolution was put, there was not a single hand held up for it but that of the mover. A motion made by Mr. Eskrigge pledging the electors present to vote for no candidate for the representation of the borough who was not favourable to the repeal of the Corn Law was then put and carried, the only dissentient being the mover of the rejected resolution.
On Monday, the 21st December, a similar meeting was held at Macclesfield, attended by Mr. Cobden, Mr. W. Rawson, Mr. J. Brooks, and Mr. W. Evans, as a deputation from the League. The result was the formation of an Anti-Corn-Law Association which should disclaim all protection to manufactures. The agitation for free trade had been, to a certain degree, suppressed in Macclesfield, by the propagation of the notion that the silk manufacture of the place would be endangered by its adoption. In reference to these two meetings, the first of hundreds of similar assemblages throughout the island, where Cobden and his compatriots popularized the philosophical doctrine of the economists, I remarked at the time that "the most important results are likely to follow when men take up a great public question with the same spirit of determination in which they pursue their own private affairs—when, in short, our merchants and manufacturers turn free—trade missionaries, there can be no doubt about the triumph of their cause." The year 1840 closed with proof that there was a demand for missionary work, and that there were men well able to perform it.
Another influential agency had now its origination. Two great banquets had been given in January. It was found that mothers, wives, and daughters, took a deep interest in the question which so much engrossed the attention of sons, husbands, and brothers. A lady, eighty years of age, told me that in her daily prayers for daily bread she also prayed for a blessing on the good work of Richard Cobden, and of all who were labouring that the afflicted poor should enjoy, in their humble homes, an abundance of the gifts which God had bestowed for the use of man. Thousands of female hearts beat indignantly at the thought that food should not be had where it could be had, while millions were in a state bordering upon starvation. Were the frigid rules of artificial society to exclude women from an agitation widely to diffuse the benefits of "plenty and cheapness ?" On Thursday night, October 29th, the Corn Exchange, in Manchester, was handsomely decorated for a tea party, at which more than eight hundred and fifty attended, a considerable portion of the company consisting of ladies. The following presided at the various tables:—
The speakers on this brilliant occasion were the chairman, Mr. Mark Philips, his colleague in the representation of Manchester Mr. K. Hyde Greg, Mr. Brotherton (member for Salford), J. B. Smith, John Brooks, Rich. Cobden, Sir Thomas Potter, Joseph Cheshire Dyer, and Lawrence Heyworth, of Liverpool. The speeches throughout breathed a spirit of high hope and firm determination.
This was the commencement of a co-operation, in which the ladies rendered effectual service to a cause endeared to them by the full confidence that it was the cause of humanity and justice. I offer no apology for the course they took, for I never had the smallest doubt of its perfect propriety and its perfect consistency with the softer characteristics of female virtue; but I subjoin M. Frederic Bastiat's eloquent vindication of the ladies of England, as a sufficient answer to any unmanly charge that has been made, or that may be made, of any want of feminine delicacy in thus taking the part of the poor and needy:—
"But, if woman does become alarmed at the dull syllogism and cold statistics, she is gifted with a marvellous sagacity, with a promptitude and certainty of appreciation, which make her detect, at once, on what side a serious enterprise sympathises with the tendencies of her own heart. She has comprehended that the effort of the League is a cause of justice and of reparation towards the suffering classes; she has comprehended that almsgiving is not the only form of charity. We are ready to succour the unfortunate, say they; but that is no reason why the law should make unfortunates. We are willing to feed those who are hungry, to clothe those who are cold, but we applaud efforts which have for their object the removal of the barriers which interpose between clothing and nakedness, between subsistence and starvation.
"And, besides, is not the part which the English ladies have taken in the work of the League in perfect harmony with the mission of woman in society? There are fêtes, soirées, given to the free-traders;—eclat, warmth, and life are communicated by their presence to those great oratorical jousts in which the condition of the masses is discussed;—a magnificent prize is held out to the most eloquent orator, or to the most indefatigable defender of liberty.
"A philosopher has said, 'A people has only one thing to do, in order to develope in its bosom every virtue, every useful energy. It is simply to honour what is honourable, and to contemn what is contemptible.' And who is the natural dispenser of shame and of glory? Woman; woman, gifted with a tact so unerring for discriminating the morality of the end, the purity of the motive, the convenience of the method; woman, who, a simple spectator of our social struggles, is always in possession of an impartiality too often foreign to our sex; woman, whose sympathy, sordid interest, or cold calculation, never ices over—the sympathy for what is noble and beautiful; woman, in fine, who forbids by a tear, and commands by a smile.
"In former times the ladies crowned the conqueror of the tourney. Valour, address, clemency, became popularised by the intoxicating sound of their applause. In those times of trouble and of violence, in which brutal force overrode the feeble and the defenceless, it was a good thing to encourage the union of the generosity which is found in the courage and loyalty of the knight, with the rude manners of the soldier.
"What! because the times are changed; because the age is advanced; because muscular force has given place to moral energy; because injustice and oppression borrow other forms, and strife is removed from the field of battle to the conflict of ideas, shall the mission of woman be terminated? Shall she always be restricted to the rear to the social movement? Shall it be forbidden to her to exercise over new customs her benignant influence, or to foster under her regard the virtues of a more elevated order which modern civilisation has called into existence?
"No! this cannot be. There is no point in the upward movement of humanity at which the empire of woman stops for ever. As civilisation transforms and elevates itself, this empire must be transformed and elevated with it, not annihilated;—there would then be an inexplicable void in the social harmony, and in the providential order of things. In our days it pertains to woman to decree to mortal virtues, to intellectual power, to enlightened philanthropy, those inestimable prizes, those irresistible encouragements, which they formerly reserved for the valour of the warrior alone. Let another seek the ridiculous side of this interference of woman in the new life of the age. I can only see its serious and touching side. Oh! if woman would but cast on political abjectness that poignant contempt with which she formerly withered military cowardice if she had for him who traffics in a vote, for him who betrays a trust, for him who deserts the cause of truth and justice, some of that mortal irony with which, in other times, she would have overwhelmed the felon knight who had abandoned the lists or purchased his life at the price of his honour, our conflict could not offer that spectacle of demoralisation and of baseness which saddens elevated hearts, jealous of the glory and dignity of their country!
"And yet there exist men, devoted of heart, of powerful intelligence, but who, at the sight of intrigue everywhere triumphant, surround themselves with a veil of reserve and of pride. One sees them giving way to envious mediocrity, extinguishing themselves in a mournful agony, discouraged and discontented. Oh! it is for the heart of woman to understand these chosen natures. If the most disgusting baseness has falsified all the springs of our institutions; if a base cupidity, not content to reign without a rival, with greater effrontery erects itself into a system; if an atmosphere of lead weighs down our social life, perhaps the the cause is to be sought in the fact, that woman has not yet taken possession of the mission which Providence has assigned to her."During the year, the executive council of the League had been busily but noiselessly engaged. No fewer than 763 petitions, with 175,840 signatures, had been sent to the Commons, and 22, with 18,003 signatures to the Lords. An active correspondence had been opened with every borough where there was any probability of influencing the return of free-trade members a million and a quarter of hand-bills and tracts had been distributed, and 20,000 of "The Anti-Corn-Law Almanack;" 330,000 copies of The Anti-Corn-Law Circular had been circulated application had been made to the clergy, and to all the corporations and all the poor-law guardians in the kingdom, to join in the movement and invitations to form anti-corn-law associations had been sent far and wide. The lecturers, also, had been earnestly at work throughout the length, breadth of the land, and had delivered more than eight hundred lectures in the principal towns of Buckinghamshire, Cheshire, Cambridge, Cornwall, Cumberland, Devon, Dorset, Derby, Durham, Essex, Gloucestershire, Hampshire, Huntingdonshire, Kent, Lancashire, Lincolnshire, Leicestershire, Middlesex, Norfolk, Nottinghamshire, Northumberland, Northamptonshire, Suffolk, Sussex, Staffordshire, Shropshire, Somersetshire, Surrey, Worcestershire, Westmorland, Wilts, and Yorkshire, besides forty-nine places in Scotland, twenty-four in Ireland, and thirty-two in Wales. This was an extensive agency, but it still needed extension. By the end of the year, arrangements had been made for a movement upon electoral districts, and several members of the council had already become missionaries to places asking for instruction, and numerous invitations had been received for such visits ; instructive tracts had been prepared; and it had been resolved greatly to increase the publications of the League. The preparations were formidable, for it was felt that the opposition to be encountered was formidable. A nation had to be educated in the true principles of political economy—a nation had to be convinced of the folly and injustice of its past commercial policy—and "stout hearts" set themselves determinedly to climb the "steep hill."