den's position, and tended to his ultimate success, was the unsatisfactory condition in which the corn duties then stood. If we admit the policy of a duty on corn, we must admit also there is the utmost difficulty in settling an impost that will suit the different requirements of the State, the grower, and the consumer. Our fiscal treatment of the Corn Laws had been neither intelligent in treatment nor happy in effect. The main trouble had sprung from the relation which the agricultural industry's claim to Protection bore to the Government's wish to facilitate the importation of food-supplies, and which led to the preference of a sliding-scale to a fixed duty. Huskisson's legislation, by its fallacious principles not less than its disastrous results, had excited a dissatisfied spirit of inquiry into the Corn Laws; while the fact that he had practically withdrawn Protection from commerce to retain it to agriculture, gave the traders a grievance that was only too well found ed. The Duke of Wellington had carried a bill on Canning's principle of making the duty vary inversely with the price of grain in the home market." In practice, the Duke's bill fixed the duty at 23s. 8d. when the price of wheat in the home market was 64s. "Thus, when wheat was at 69s., the duty was 16s. 8d.; and when the home price rose to 73s., then the duty fell to the nominal rate of 1s. This was the Corn Law which Cobden and his friends rose up to overthrow." No doubt many objections might justly be taken both to the principle of the bill and the incidence of the rates, and many arguments might have been adduced for the Whig alternative of a fixed duty. In fact, the time when Cobden began to agitate was a most favourable

one for the reorganisation of our tariff, and for recognising the altered conditions that had overtaken commerce and agriculture respectively. Had Manchester contented itself with pressing its just claims, much national good might have sprung from the discussion. But nothing short of Free Trade would serve the purpose of the Anti-CornLaw League in dealing a blow in the interests of the "great industrialists" at the "landed aristocracy."

But we are falling into Mr. Mcrley's own error of leaving Cobden too much in the background, and must now take some notice of the part which he played in the conflict. It was in October 1838 that the AntiCorn-Law Association was founded in Manchester; and from that date down to the period of repeal, Cobden may be said to have devoted his whole time and energy to pressing the question. He had the example of the successful agitation of O'Connell-who had stood godfather to him when he at first failed to carry Stockport-before his eyes; and he laid his plans very much on the same lines as those on which Catholic emancipation had been urged forward until it became a subject that a party Government could not refuse to deal with. During the three years preceding the fall of the Melbourne Ministry, the paid lecturers of the League had been endeavouring to stir up feeling in favour of Free Trade all over the country, but had met with little success outside the manufacturing districts, and no impression had been made upon any of the leading organs of public opinion. In the general

election of 1841, a small number of repealers got into the House; and among others, Cobden was returned for Stockport. He at once spoke on the subject of Free Trade, in the debate which led to the

break-up of Lord Melbourne's Government, but did not obtain much attention for his views. He is, however, as confident in himself as contemptuous of his opponents. "All my friends say I did well. But I feel it very necessary to be cautious in speaking too much." He was answered by "a booby who let fly at the manufacturers." Shortly after, he writes of his opponents as young obscures," "young fry," "classicals," "noodles;" and although the youngest of legislators, he places himself at the outset upon a comparatively lofty altitude among his fellow-members of Parliament. Although, perhaps, the least narrow and most tolerant of the Manchester agitators, Cobden had all the intense contempt for any one who could hold a view opposite to his own, which has become one of the most marked characteristics of present-day Radicalism, and of which we may point to the volumes before us as bearing unimpeachable testimony.

It was not until Messrs. Cobden and Bright took to the country to agitate, that the principles of the League began to make headway. Mr. Morley sees in the picture of "two plain men leaving their homes and their business, and going over the length and breadth of the land to convert the nation," "something apostolic." In one respect, the parallel does not hold good, for the League was already raising and spending enormous sums in promoting the spread of its principles. We must quote Mr. Morley's contrast of these latter-day apostles:

"It has often been pointed out how the two great spokesmen of the League were the complements of one another; how their gifts differed so that one exactly covered the ground which the other was predisposed to leave comparatively untouched. The differences between them, it is true, were not so

many as the points of resemblance. If in Mr. Bright there was a deeper austerity, in both there was the same homeliness of allusion, and the same graphic plainness. Both avoided the stilted abstractions of rhetoric, and neither was ever afraid of the vulgarity of details. In Cobden, as in Bright, we feel that there was nothing personal or small, and that what they cared for so vehemently were great causes. There was a resolute standing aloof from the small things of party, which would be almost arrogant, if the whole texture of what they had to say were less thoroughly penetrated with political morality, and with humanity. Then there came the points of difference. Mr. Bright had all the resources of He passion alive within his breast. was carried along by vehement political anger, and deeper than that there glowed a wrath as stern as that of an ancient prophet. To cling to a mischievous error seemed to him to savour of moral depravity and corruption of heart. What he saw was the selfishness of the aristocracy and the landlords, and he was too deeply moved very patiently with the bad reasoning by hatred of this, to care to deal which their own self-interest inclined his adversaries to mistake for good. His invective was not the expression of mere irritation, but of profound and menacing passion. Hence he dominated his audiences from a

height, while his companion rather drew them along after him as friends and equals. Cobden was by no means incapable of passion, of violent feeling, or of vehement expression. His fighting qualities were in their own way as formidable as Mr. Bright's;

and he had a way of dropping his

jaw and throwing back his head, when he took off his gloves for an encounter in good earnest, which was not less alarming to his opponents than the more sombre style of his colleague. Still it was not passion to which we must look for the secret of his orato

rical success. I have asked many scores of those who knew him, Conservatives as well as Liberals, what this secret was; and in no single case did my interlocutor fail to begin, and in nearly every case he ended as he had begun, with the word persuasive

ness."

We may descend from "stilted abstractions" to the concrete difference between the two, and plainly say that Mr. Cobden cajoled while Mr. Bright bullied the masses. But their campaign was only attended by moderate success, and Mr. Morley greatly overestimates the impression they produced on the country. Instead of the sight of the "two plain men" calling forth the lofty feelings that are suggested in the above extract, their progress seems to have been more generally treated with ridicule. They drew large meetings of the workmen, and were supported by manufacturers and traders in the towns which they visited; but it cannot be said that they succeeded in investing the movement with a national character. In September 1842, Cobden himself admitted that they had succeeded in producing nothing beyond a middle-class agitation. "We have carried it on by those means by which the middle class usually

We

carries on its movements. have had our meetings of Dissenting ministers; we have obtained the co-operation of the ladies; we have resorted to tea-parties, and taken those pacific means for carrying out our views which mark us rather as a middle-class set of agitators."

Among other "middle class" expedients of the League, pictorial representation occupied a prominent place, generally taking the form of bloated farmers and of labourers starved to skeletons, with gibbets and pendent bodies understood to have been consigned there by the tyranny of the upper classes, and with abundant representations of death's-heads, cross-bones, and other relics of mortality suggestive of the people perishing under the influence of the Corn Laws. Connected with this subject there is a passage that we cannot read without pain. Mr.

Morley tells us that Cobden had at the beginning of the movement been "very near securing the services" of Thackeray, who was then a struggling littérateur, with no better reputation to back him up than his authorship of the 'Great Hoggarty Diamond.'

666

Some inventor of a new mode

of engraving,' Mr. Henry Cole wrote to Cobden, told Mr. Thackeray that it was applicable to the designs for the Corn Laws. Three drawings of your Anglo-Polish Allegory have been made and have failed. So Thackeray has given up the invention, and woodengraving must be used. This will materially alter the expense. . . . I hope you will think as well of the accompanying sketch-very rough, of It was the work of only a few minutes, course-as all I have shown it to, do. and I think, with its corpses, gibbet, and flying carrion-crow, is as suggestive as you can wish. We both thought that a common soldier would be better understood than any more allegorical figure. It is only in part an adapta

cessful one. tion of your idea, but I think a sucFigures representing eagerness of exchange, a half-clothed Pole offering bread, and a weaver manufactures, would be idea enough for a design alone. Of course, there may be any changes you please in this titude, it would be well to have the present design. I think, for the mul

ideas

all. The artist is a genius, both with very simple and intelligible to his pencil and his pen. His vocation is literary. He is full of humour and feeling. Hitherto he has not had occasion to think much on the subject of Corn Laws, and therefore wants the stuff to work upon. He would drawing when sufficiently primed, like to combine both writing and

and then he would write and illustrate ballads, or tales, or anything. I think you would find him a most effective auxiliary; and perhaps the best way to fill him with matter for illustrations, would be to invite him to see the weavers, their mills, shut

tles, et-cetera. If you like the sketch, perhaps you will return it to me, and I will put it in the way of being engraved.'”

There was, however, another means employed, which, quite as much as oratory and tea-meetings, was likely to popularise the question. We are told that in the course of the four years the League had been at work, from the beginning of 1839 to the autumn of 1843, £100,000 had been spent in agitation. The Council then made up its mind to raise a new fund of £50,000, which was speedily collected. It must strike every impartial mind that the principles of Free Trade could have had but very slender hold of the opinions of the country when such an enormous expenditure was required to ripen them. "The scheme which we especially aim at carrying out," writes Cobden, in a letter to Mr. Edward Baines, begging him to raise funds in the West Riding, "is this: To make an attack upon every registered elector of the kingdom, county and borough, by sending to each a packet of publications embracing the whole argument as it affects both the agricultural and trading view of the question. But the plan involves an expense of £20,000. Add to this our increased expenditure in lectures, &c., and the contemplated cost of the spring deputations in London, and we shall require £50,000 to do justice to the cause before next June." In the course of next year "500 persons were employed in distributing tracts from house to house." Five millions of these tracts, "weighing a hundred tons of paper"-Mr. Morley makes no allowance for the additional weight after printing-"had been scat tered over the kingdom." Out of £100,000 demanded for the cam

paign of 1845, nearly £90,000 was raised before the end of 1844. In 1845, the League's expenses were £1000 a-week. And yet, in the opinion of the League itself, the agitation was not making headway in spite of this immense outlay. In the times of depression amid which the League had been started, it had met with much warm and general sympathy; but with the return of prosperity after 1843, the agitation cooled down,-a significant intimation that present relief rather than perpetual advantage was expected from the principles of Free Trade. It was felt that a change of tactics was necessary. Persuasion was not doing the work; and Cobden was planning a scheme for swamping the votes of the counties by the creation of forty shilling freeholders, in which "not less than £250,000 were invested" in 1845. While at about the same time it was resolved to depend rather on agitation in Parliament than on an effort to rouse the feeling of the country.

It is one of the disadvantages connected with government by party, that when a movement in the country attains a certain power, one or other of the divisions in the Legislature will swallow its scruples and turn it to capital, apart altogether from its real views regarding the merits involved. So it was in the case of Free Trade. The Whigs were fully as inimical to its principles as were the Tories. The abuse which Mr. Cobden pours upon the Whigs is only surpassed by the contempt which his biographer expresses for the same party. Both Whigs and Tories regarded the Free Traders with distrust almost down to the very time when, in shifty circumstances, they each saw an opportunity of turning the movement to individual account. It certainly was not any great national feeling

that the League had succeeded in rousing upon the question of Free Trade, neither was it the power which the Free-Traders had acquired in Parliament, that compelled the Legislature to listen to their demands. It was because Free Trade could be made a means of either turning out a Government or of strengthening a Ministry, that the policy of the League was adopted as a legitimate Parliamentary subject.

We have no intention of defending the course that Sir Robert Peel took throughout the Corn Law agitation; but at the same time, there is much that may be urged in extenuation of his conduct. He was statesman enough to recognise the difficulties which the Government had to face in dealing with the duties on food imports; but he had not the courage or the ability that was required to dissipate the delusions of the Leaguers, and to put the question upon a fair and reasonable footing. We must add to this that Peel's mind was largely leavened by the commercial view of policy, and that he looked upon a transfer of power from the landed classes to the "great industrialists" as inevitable. This hypothesis, which can with little difficulty be substantiated, explains the grounds of Peel's veering upon the questions of Free Trade. While the "brutish squires and bull-frogs," the "noodles," "obscures," and "classicals" to quote Mr. Cobdenspoke from a plain common-sense point of view of the changes which their experience of agriculture told them must come over the landed interests, Peel never faced the main issues involved, but quibbled with the League upon questions of finance, and rather sought to ridicule their arguments than to point out what would be the natural effects

of their policy. He felt all the economical difficulties which attached to the sliding-scale; perhaps he felt still more the political obstructions which stood between him and a fixed duty. On the whole, his course in 1842, when he declared for a modification of Canning's sliding-scale principle, and for reducing in a slight degree the protection enjoyed by agriculturists in favour of consumers, is perfectly intelligible. The weak position which he took up naturally exposed him to the attacks of those who were Protectionists by conviction, as well as of those who fought the battle of Protection on purely personal grounds. Mr. Morley dates the change in Peel's mind from the Report of the Import Duties Committee of 1840. We cannot accept this view without qualifications. In spite of Peel's proclivities towards a commercial policy-in spite of his natural dissatisfaction with the existing tariff, and his despair of being able to satisfy all parties by a revision-we have no reason to believe that Peel seriously contemplated the acceptance of the programme of the League as a part of Ministerial policy until towards the close of 1845. On 22d November in that year, Lord John Russell, in a manifesto dated from Edinburgh, announced the adoption of the League principles by the Whig party; and this declaration, affecting as it did vitally the position of his Ministry, practically made Sir Robert Peel bow to the behests of the agitators. We need not discuss the morality of Peel's position any more than that of Lord John Russell's. Neither will stand. the application of a high test; and of the two, that of Lord John Russell and the Whigs who looked for office will bear the least inspection. There