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Poor rates, quarter sessions, turnpikes, corn-laws, next assizes, rail-roads and parish matters, with a touch of the horse and dog between primo and secondo genitur, for variety. If politics turn up, you can read who host is in a gineral way with half an eye. If he is an ante-corn-lawer, then he is a manufacturer that wants to grind the poor instead of grain. He is a new man and reformer.
The ministry at once resigned, and Lord John Russell had no difficulty in forming an administration, now that the question of the Corn-laws was finally settled.
They have power enough to keep up the game-laws and corn-laws; but they have not power enough to subject the bodies of men of the lowest class to wanton outrage at their pleasure. Suppose that they were to make a law that any gentleman of two thousand a-year might have a day-labourer or a pauper flogged with a cat-of-nine-tails whenever the whim might take him.
But it was necessary, his apologist will say, that the corn-laws should be repealed; he saw the necessity, and yielded to it. It certainly was necessary, very necessary, very unavoidable; absolutely necessary one may say; a fact, which the united efforts of all the Peels of the day could in nowise longer delay, having already delayed it to the utmost extent of their power.
He avowed himself a man of moderate political opinions; recognized the existence of manufacturing and commercial distress, but referred it to causes of only a temporary nature, unconnected with the corn-laws; repudiated the empirical expedients proposed by the late ministry; and pledged himself to maintain the principle of protection to our agricultural interests; declaring his deliberate preference of a sliding scale of duties, to a fixed duty, upon foreign corn.
To be serious, the alteration of the Corn-Laws was undoubtedly a very bold one, but the result of most anxious and profound consideration.
It would be quite superfluous to dilate on the value of the information thus supplied, without which, indeed, much of our subsequent legislation on poor-laws, corn-laws, and all matters relating to rating and taxation, would have been impracticable or the merest guesswork.
In 1841, Sir R. Peel again entered office; and though he undeniably was enabled to do so by the Protectionist party, by the force of circumstances, the stagnation of commerce, the failure of the crops, and the famine in Ireland he opened the ports, and repealed the Corn-laws forever, to the consternation of the world, and in opposition to all the opinions of his life; this was in 1845.
Where has there been called one single spontaneous public meeting of any importance, and where exhibited a spark of enthusiasm, for the total repeal of the Corn-laws? Surely the topic is capable of being handled in a sufficiently exciting manner!
Independently of the corn-laws, what is to be their policy as to Ireland, as to foreign affairs, as to domestic finance? Is the Popish Church to be endowed in the sister kingdom? or is the Protestant Establishment to be overthrown? Is repeal to be openly patronized, or only covertly connived at?
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