It was on the 20th December that Sir Robert Peel summoned his late colleagues in Downing Street, to inform them that he had resumed office, and to invite their assistance in abolishing the duties on foreign corn. The conclave was depressed and downcast, for the situation was unique and embarrassing. Lord Stanley, true to his imperious impulses, persisted in resigning. He refused to believe that the destitution in Ireland was so bad as it was painted by Peel, and it is but just to say that his main reason for deserting his leader had no direct connection with the effect of the Corn Laws on the price of food. The real interest of the country, Lord Stanley contended, was to have a flourishing rural population. That could only exist under the shadow of a territorial aristocracy, maintained by a Corn Law which kept up rents, because it kept up prices. No conscious self-interest seems to have tainted Lord Stanley’s motives, and the same may be said of Cobden and the Free Traders, who, on the other hand, believed that the world would gain by the substitution of a commercial for a territorial aristocracy. The aim of the Free Traders, in fact, was to rule the English people by an oligarchy of rich manufacturers, thus “thrusting aside the nobles,” and creating “a new policy specially adapted to the life of a great trading community.”[18] Lord Stanley’s idea, however, was that the landed interest had made England; that it gave her social stability and military power; that it had won her battles by sea and land, and built up her mighty fabric of empire. The Corn Laws he believed, quite honestly, to be the
[Illustration: THE IRISH FAMINE: STARVING PEASANTS AT A WORKHOUSE GATE.]
outworks of a great system of landlordism which gave the State a solid basis. His firm conviction was that Mr. Cobden and the Leaguers were eager to capture the outworks, that they might the more easily storm the citadel. And this idea, too, was common to the Whigs, who were advocates of a duty on corn, which, though small, was to be fixed. Through Lord Melbourne they had taught the country and the Queen that a man must
be mad who would dream of abolishing the Corn Laws--and they showed no sign, as a Party, of wavering in that conviction till the 22nd of November, 1845, when Lord John Russell sent the famous “Edinburgh Letter” to his constituents in the City of London, abandoning Protection once and for ever. It is but fair to remind a later generation of the relation in which the two great Parties stood to the Corn Law, because partisan writers often present an inadequate conception of the arduous task which Peel set himself, when he undertook to abolish the Corn Duties, in defiance of beliefs long rooted in the minds not only of the people, but of the governing classes of England.