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classes. The wealthier families were fed largely on meat and other foods superior to corn; while the lowest classes, who suffered most from the Corn Law, could not afford bread, but lived on potatoes, turnips, and other inferior foods. There remained a large middle section of the population, the betteroff working men and the lower middle orders, to whom bread was the staple diet; these therefore used more than the average' quarter of corn per head, and paid much more than the ten shillings a year per head to keep up the landlords' rents. In case of a fair-sized family the tax on bread alone would amount to several pounds a year-a fifth of their income, as Cobden calculated. Meat, still more highly taxed, was placed beyond their means, and it was but seldom that they could afford butter, cheese and sugar.

Not only this bread-eating class, but the potato-fed class below them-the latter including the agricultural labourers at six shillings a week, the alleged beneficiaries' of Protectionstruggled through from year to year by 'clemming.' 'Clemming,' a word terribly familiar under the Protectionist régime, means 'starving.' The prevalence of the habits of 'clemming' and eating potatoes and turnips, was among the reasons why corn did not always keep up at the price intended by a benevolent legislature. Prices of wheat, in fact, varied with the English harvest. The nation depended year by year on the home harvest instead of on the world harvest, from the steadying effect of which it was cut off by the Corn Laws.

These were the reasons why Bright felt so passionately about the Corn Laws. Once, in November 1843, while addressing a meeting of merchants, bankers, traders and others of Manchester, he said, 'I confess I have more sympathy with the millions of the working classes of Yorkshire and Lancashire than I have with the merchants and manufacturers of England. The latter are able to help themselves, and if they choose to invite upon their necks the hoofs of the landed oligarchy, they deserve the trampling. But the millions who toil, and who for years have been craving to be permitted to toil for their daily food, they have little power or influence over the Government. They are an enormous but a disorganised mass, and for them I have a sympathy, more intense than it is possible for language to describe.'

The enormous but disorganised mass' of the wage-earners in town and country would indeed have had no chance of freeing themselves from Protection if they had not had the help of the middle class. But the manufacturers found their trade

being ruined by the taxes on food and raw material. One of the aspects of the tariff most resented in Lancashire was its effect upon foreign nations in stimulating competition with English manufactures. Foreign nations, if our laws had permitted them, would have continued to supply us with the food and raw material which they had in greater abundance than ourselves. But when we ourselves stopped that trade, they had nothing else to exchange for our manufactured goods, and were therefore forced to begin manufacturing those very goods for which England was renowned. In the heyday of British Protection, our foreign market ceased to expand. It is a mistake to suppose that our export trade has been always on the increase. Under the Protective system it was stagnant for long years together. The value of the declared exports in the five years succeeding the introduction of the Reform Bill (1830-34) was actually less than what it had been in the five years that succeeded the end of the war (1816-20), although three millions had been added to the population.

Home trade was in an equally bad condition, varying according to the good and bad harvest; the vast majority of the population, after buying food, had not the money to buy other articles. Cobden showed that no agricultural labourer in England spent more than thirty shillings a year in manufactures, if shoes were excepted. Bad as foreign trade was, more goods were exported to Brazil in one year than had been consumed in the same time by the whole agricultural peasantry and their families in England.1

With home and foreign trade stagnant, and population increasing by leaps and bounds, there must needs have been terrible suffering, even if such wealth as there was in the island had been well distributed.

The tariff that organised the ruin of the British manufacturer, did not even pretend to give him 'protection.' Huskisson's principal achievements in his budgets of 1824-25 had been a great reduction of the tariffs protecting Englishmade goods. The landlord M.P.'s were perfectly willing, so long as corn was well taxed, to let him make or mar British industry by an experiment in his Free Trade fad. And so it came about that when the Whigs and Peel succeeded to Huskisson, by far the greater part of the duties were imposed upon food and raw material, which the manufacturers and their workmen required cheap, while only a very small part of the tariff was directed to excluding foreign goods of the kinds 1 Cobden's speech in House of Commons, March 13, 1845.

SCIENCE AND POLITICS

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which they were producing. In 1840, out of more than twenty millions of revenue raised by Customs, the amount of duties levied on the plea of protection to British manufactures scarcely exceeded a million sterling. Thus, even if the protection of a million had been in the true interest of the manufacturers as a whole, they had to write it off against twenty times that sum collected in duties, chiefly on food and raw material, which were not even intended to benefit them, and most of which were doing them visible and daily injury.1

It is not easy to estimate the influence of the economists in the Free Trade movement. In its early and less democratic stages much must be attributed to the sound theorists who persuaded the minds of some of our statesmen. Had it not been for the rude interruption of the French war, Pitt might have realised the complete body of Adam Smith's doctrine in a series of peace budgets, before any one else understood what he was doing.2 Huskisson, who thirty years later took up Pitt's abandoned task, was also inspired, directly or indirectly, by Adam Smith; and the personal influence of Ricardo in the House of Commons was considerable in the early 'twenties. The remissions of tariff by Huskisson and by Poulett Thomson, the Whig minister who followed slowly in his steps, were made by them in pursuance of a theory which the ordinary Whig or Tory member did not believe because it was still speculative, and had not been tested before his eyes. But the House tolerated experiments from men whose intelligence they respected-provided corn was left untouched. The mere power of academic persuasion would never have broken down the sacred barrier of the Corn Laws; for the dismal science' by itself could not call out the fighting forces of politics. The economists based their arguments on a view of human life, which, though true as regards commerce, was only partially true and wholly repulsive in many other relations of man to man. And they did not know how to carry their arguments from the study to the platform.

The free traders,' Poulett Thomson confessed, 'have never been orators since Mr. Pitt's early days. We hammered away with facts and figures and some arguments; but we could not elevate the subject and excite the feelings of the people.' Indeed to render the valuable results of political

1 See Select Committee of the House of Commons on Import Duties, 1840, report and evidence.

* It has been wittily said by Mr. Herbert Paul that Fox thought political economy was a dodge of Pitt's.' And nearly all of his supporters and opponents were equally in the dark.

economy human and popular is not easy, and it is a characteristic trumph of English political genius to have found out the way. In the first years of Queen Victoria's reign, the men born to do it were just beginning to buckle on their armour for a kind of warfare altogether new in history. Cobden and Bright were about to replace Malthus and Ricardo. Books of political economy used, it is said, to begin with the words, 'Suppose a man on an island.' But Cobden's thought began with visible starving Stockport, and having put a girdle round the commercial globe came back with gathered treasures of observation to end at Stockport again; while to Bright Free Trade was a religious passion, sustained by pity and wrath, which he had the gift to communicate in their purest form to thousands of hearers at a time.

But this religious passion was based upon careful and accurate thought. At the end of Bright's diary for 1843 is a short treatise on the Corn Laws in his handwriting, in which he has summed up his philosophy of the question :

'Corn Law.

'Monopoly of the home market given to the proprietors of the British soil, under pretence of public good. Monopoly presupposes some advantage to those who possess it.

'It gives to them the possession of the market and excludes foreign grown corn in order that in a market insufficiently supplied they may obtain a higher price than their corn is really worth. This higher price can only be obtained by preventing the food market being as abundantly supplied as it would be if the regular laws of commerce were not interfered with. This higher price therefore exists and is procurable only from the existence of scarcity intentionally created by law.

'This increased value places the food out of the reach of those whose means are most limited, whilst the more wealthy classes are still able to procure as much as they require. The pressure of scarcity comes then upon the poorest portion of the people.

'In a besieged city the rich and powerful can hold out longest-the poor and defenceless feel famine soonest.

This law-made famine is unequal, sparing the rich and crushing the poor.

'Famine on board a ship at sea would be equally borne by all. Admiral and cabin-boy would share the biscuits,