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Updated: June 6, 2025
The Queen's University. Post-office Regulations. The Opening of Letters. Naturalization of Aliens. Recall of Lord Ellenborough. Reversal of the Vote on the Sugar Duties. Refusal of the Crown to Sanction a Bill. The Question of Increase in the Number of Spiritual Peers. Repeal of the Corn-laws. Revolution in France, and Agitation on the Continent. Death of Sir Robert Peel.
In vain Cato inveighed against this shortsighted policy: the rise of demagogism had a part in it, and these extraordinary, but presumably very frequent, distributions of grain under the market price by the government or individual magistrates became the germs of the subsequent corn-laws.
It was essential that the corn-laws should be repealed; but by no means essential that this should be done by Sir Robert Peel. It was a matter of indifference to us Englishmen who did the deed. But to Sir Robert Peel it was a matter of great moment that he should do it.
They resolved to open a new campaign against Ministers and the Corn-laws greatly to augment their numbers and pecuniary resources to redouble their exertions, and immensely to extend the sphere of their operations.
"As a consequence of the repeal of the Corn-laws, we promise cheaper food, and our hand-loom weavers would get double the rate of wages!" "We shall have cheap bread, and its price will be reduced 33 per cent." The League Oracle admits that "a repeal would injure the farmer, but not so much as he fears." Mr Cobden says "If we have free trade, the landlords will have as good rents as now."
Essay on the Application of Capital to Land, by a Fellow of University College, Oxford, 1815. Essay, p. 19. In An Inquiry into the Nature of the Corn-laws, and again in Observations on Agriculture, etc., vol. v. 401-51. Political Works, i. 485, etc.
Such moments of expansion in modern history were the Confession of Augsburg, the plantation of America, the English Commonwealth of 1648, the Declaration of American Independence in 1776, the British emancipation of slaves in the West Indies, the passage of the Reform Bill, the repeal of the Corn-Laws, the Magnetic Ocean-Telegraph, though yet imperfect, the passage of the Homestead Bill in the last Congress, and now, eminently, President Lincoln's Proclamation on the twenty-second of September.
The next year a measure for the repeal of the corn-laws was introduced into parliament by the prime-minister. In spite of the fierce opposition of Mr Disraeli and his friends, it passed both Houses by large majorities. At the close of the debates, Peel frankly acknowledged that the honour of passing this great measure was due, not to himself, but to Richard Cobden.
The repeal of the corn-laws must render any such attempt ruinous; and, as if it were not enough to expose the Irish farmer to foreign competition, the ministry are now trying, and "they hope with success," to destroy the home market; by substituting Indian corn, which can never be raised in the country, in place of oats and potatoes, which have hitherto constituted the food of the people.
Karl Marx for example, in a very interesting passage written in England about the time of the abolition of the Corn-laws, declared that the radical manufacturers, who professed to support that measure on the ground that it would secure cheap food for the people, were not moved in reality, and were not capable of being moved, by any desire but that of lowering the rate of wages, and thus increasing the surplus which they raked into their own pockets.
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