Anti-Corn Law League Formed

The League showered pamphlets, tracts, letters, newspapers, all over the country.

Continuing Corn Laws Repealed in England,
our selection from Epoch of Reform by Justin Mccarthy published in 1892. The selection is presented in five easy 5 minute installments. For works benefiting from the latest research see the “More information” section at the bottom of these pages.

Previously in Corn Laws Repealed in England.

Time: 1846
Place: England

The Anti-Corn-Law League was formed, and a Free-Trade Hall was built in Manchester on the scene of that disturbance which was called the “massacre of Peterloo.” The leaders of the Anti-Corn-Law movement were Richard Cobden, John Bright, and Charles Villiers. Cobden was not a Manchester man. He was the son of a Sussex farmer. After the death of his father he was taken by his uncle and employed in his wholesale warehouse in the city of London. He afterward became a partner in a Manchester cotton-factory, and sometimes travelled on the commercial business of the establishment. He became what would then have been considered a great traveler, distinct, of course, from the class of explorers; that is, he made himself thoroughly familiar with most or all of the countries of Europe, with various parts of the East, and with the United States and Canada. He had had a fair, homely education, and he improved it wherever he went by experience, by observation, and by conversation with all manner of men. He became one of the most effective and persuasive popular speakers ever known in English agitation. He was not an orator in the highest sense. He had no imagination and little poetic feeling, nor did genuine passion ever inflame into fervor of declamation his quiet, argumentative style. But he had humor; he spoke simple, clear, strong English; he used no unnecessary words. He always made his meaning plain and intelligible, and he had an admirable faculty for illustrating every argument by something drawn from reading or from observation or from experience. He was, in fact, the very perfection of a common-sense talker, a man fit to deal with men by fair, straightforward argument, to expose complicated sophistries, and to make clear the most perplexed parts of an intricate question. He was exactly the man for that time, for that question, and for the persuasive and argumentative part of the great controversy which he had undertaken.

Cobden’s chief companion in the struggle was John Bright, whose name has been completely identified with that of Cobden in the repeal of the Corn Laws. Bright was an orator of the highest order. He had all the qualifications that make a master of eloquence. His presence was commanding; his voice was singularly strong and clear, and had peculiar tones and shades in it which gave indescribable meaning to passages of anger, of pity, or of contempt. His manner was quiet, composed, serene. He indulged in little or no gesticulation, he had a rich gift of genuine Saxon humor. These two men, one belonging to the middle class of the North, one sprung from the yeomanry of Southern England, had as a colleague Charles Villiers, a man of high aristocratic family, of marked ability, and of indomitable loyalty to any cause he undertook. Villiers for some years represented the free-trade cause in Parliament, and Bright and Cobden did its work on the platform. Cobden first, and Bright after him, became members of the House of Commons, and they were further assisted there by Milner Gibson, a man of position and family, an effective debater, who had been at first a Conservative, but who passed over to the ranks of the Free Traders, and through them to the ranks of the Liberals or Radicals.

Every year Villiers brought on a motion in the House in favor of free trade. For a long time this motion was only one of the annual performances which, by an apparently inevitable necessity, have to prelude for many years the practical movement of any great parliamentary question. Villiers might have brought on his annual motion all his life, without getting much nearer to his object, if Manchester, Birmingham, Sheffield, Leeds, and other great northern towns had not taken the matter vigorously in hand; if Cobden and Bright had not stirred up the energies of the whole country, and brought clearly home to the mind of every man the plain fact that reason, argument, and arithmetic, as well as freedom and justice, were distinctly on their side.

The Anti-Corn-Law League showered pamphlets, tracts, letters, newspapers, all over the country. They sent lecturers into every town, preaching the same doctrine, and proving by scientific facts the justice of the cause they advocated. These lecturers were enjoined to avoid as much as possible any appeals to sentiment or to passion. The cause they had in hand was one which could best be served by the clear statement of rigorous facts, by the simple explanation of economical truths which no sophism could darken, and which no opposing eloquence could charm away. The Melbourne Ministry fell in 1841. It died of inanition: its force was spent. Sir Robert Peel came into office. Cobden, who then entered the House of Commons for the first time, seemed to have good hope that even Peel, strong Conservative though he was, might prove to be a man from whom the Free Traders could expect substantial assistance. Sir Robert Peel had, in fact, in those later years expressed again and again his conviction as to the general truth of the principles of free trade. “All agree,” he said in 1842, “in the general rule that we should buy in the cheapest and sell in the dearest market.” But he contended that while such was the general rule, yet various economical and social conditions made it necessary that there should be some distinct exceptions, and he regarded the corn laws and sugar duties as such exceptions. It may be mentioned, perhaps, that the corn laws had, in fact, been treated as a necessary exception by many of the leading exponents of the principles of free trade. Thus we have to notice the curious fact that while Sir Robert Peel’s own party looked upon his accession to power as a certain guarantee against any concession to the Free Traders, the Free Traders themselves were, for the most part, convinced that their cause had better hope from him than from a Whig Ministry.

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