COBDEN AND THE CORN-LAWS.* ONE of the commonest cant phrases

of the present con- troversy is that it is worse than useless to quote Cobden or the early Free-traders. If it is merely meant that the con- ditions have changed, that starvation and hunger are no longer prevalent in our midst as object-lessons of the harm which can be done by Protection in the interests of a powerful political class, the warning is indeed a commonplace. But as the controversy proceeds, and Protection rears its head with increasing boldness, we shall be surprised if Free-traders do not draw some of their most serviceable weapons from the armoury of speeches and writings of sixty years ago. A perusal of this useful reprint at all events shows with what wealth of detail and illustration the points now most hotly disputed, such as the relation between prices and wages, were argued out by Cobden, and suggests that no great exercise of intelligence would be required to adapt his arguments to the situation as it exists to-day.

It is both a strength and a weakness that the argument fot Free-trade is founded upon considerations of theory, however much it may be corroborated by fact, and that it will not be easily accepted by minds—and there are many such among men of high intelligence—which are incapable of comprehend- ing a proposition of political economy. But Cobden's writings will be searched in vain for any naked assertion of principle. He never makes assumptions which he cannot and does not

prove. His principles are not taken from economic treatises, but are formulated by an intuitive process from observation of the facts and conditions with which he has to deal. He

picks them up as he goes along. "I set myself up to teach people years ago," he said in 1845; "I have been learning more than anybody else every day since." He possessed to an extraordinary degree the art of marshalling his facts and presenting them in the form of sustained and logical argu- ment. But this alone would not have made him what Mr. Balfour once described him, "the most effective of mission- aries and the greatest of agitators for the particular objects he had in view and for the particular audiences he had to address." It was not, we venture to think, his appeal to class prejudice so much as his perception of the needs of the masses of the people, and of the fact that Free-trade alone could minister to them, which gave him his legitimate triumph. He attacked monopoly, and the Corn-law as the "keystone in the

arch of monopoly," in the interests of the masses of the people. "Where is the difference," he asked, "between stealing a man

and making him labour on the one band, and robbing volun- tary labourers on the other of the fruits of their labour ? " For that and nothing less must be, in greater or less degree. the effect of "protective taxes, which are monopoly taxes paid to individuals, not to the Government," taxes which it was the object of Free-trade to remove. Perhaps the chief lesson to be drawn from Cobden's speeches is the need of insisting on the direct effect of the Free-trade policy on the welfare of the working classes, with which the prosperity of all other classes is bound up. To meet the short-sighted clamour of producing interests, now enormously wealthier and better organised than fifty years ago, an even greater effort of educa- tion will be required than that of the Anti-Corn-Law League; and we can only hope that leaders inspired with the faith and spirit of Cobden and Bastiat may be found to guide it.

One of the arguments which Cobden had to meet was that to reduce the price of corn would be to reduce the labourer's wages,—the converse of Mr. Chamberlain's assertion that higher-priced bread would mean higher wages. Cobden showed how in manufacturing industries the "rate of wages had no more connection with the price of food than the moon's changes" :—

"It depends entirely on the demand for labour The

price of food never becomes an ingredient in testing the value of

labour To talk of benefiting labourers by making one of the main articles of their consqmption scarce ! The agricultural labourers live by wages ; what fs it which regulates the wages of labour in every country? Why, the quantity of the necessaries and comforts of life which form the fund out of which labour is paid, and the proportion which they bear to the whole number of

labourers to be maintained . For the last twenty years—I state it most emphatically as a truth—whenever corn has been cheap wages have been high in Lancashire ; and, on the other

• Speeches on Free Trade. By Richard Cobden. London i Macmillan and Co. [6d.]

hand, when bread has been dear wages have been greatly reduced."

In the same connection Cobden constantly laboured to show how the general prosperity of the country depended on the prosperity of the labouring classes, the great consuming classes of the country ; and how fatal, therefore, was any arti- ficial enhancement of prices in the supposed interests of the producing classes. Demand is the foundation of all exchange, and you cannot have good trade if demand for commodities is non-existent, from whatever cause. The argument he used in combating the idea that Peel's reductions in the tariff in 1842 had caused distress among the farmers by lowering prices incidentally illustrated this point :—

" Did it never enter the minds of hon. gentlemen who are inter- ested in the sale of cattle that their customers in large towns cannot be sinking into abject poverty and distress, without the evil ultimately reaching themselves in the price of their produce? I had occasion, a little time ago, to look at the falling off in the consumption of cattle in the town of Stockport. I calculated the falling off, in the town of Stockport alone, for three or four years, at more than all the increase in the importation of foreign cattle. It appears therefore that the distress of that town alone has done as much to reduce prices as all the importation under the tariff. It has been estimated that in Manchester, 40 per cent. less of cattle was consumed in 1842 than in 1835, and it has also been estimated that the cotton trade was paying £7,000,000 less in wages per annum in 1842 than in 1836. How could you then expect the same consumption? If you would but look to your own interests as broadly and as wisely as manufacturers look to theirs, you would never fall into the error of supposing that you can ruin your customers, and yet, at the same time, prosper in your pursuits."

The argument was addressed to agriculturists; it might well be pondered by those manufacturers who, as we are assured, are lending a ready ear to proposals which, whatever else they may do, must, if carried, diminish the purchasing power of their customers in the home market. For the most irre- futable testimony to the policy which has, by enlarging the circle of exchanges, created and sustained a demand for com- modities of every description (and primarily, it should never be forgotten, for commodities of home production) is the extent and prosperity to which the home market has attained under Free-trade, among a population which without Free- trade could not have reached anything like its present pro- portions.

The conditions and prospects of agriculture form the burden of many of these speeches on the Corn-laws. We are not concerned to deny that Cobden's view of the future of British agriculture was too optimistic ; but it is certain that the state of farming generally, and of the agricultural labourers in particular, was far worse than anything we can conceive of nowadays. From the position of an industry which was rotten in every part, and owed its rottenness to the " fostering " effect of Protection, it has at least reached, as the best observers tell us, a healthy, normal, and even progressive stage. The relative decadence into which it has fallen, moreover, could not have been averted by the moderate Protection which could alone have been maintained. For the days of high Protection had become for ever impossible :—

" I tell you," said Cobden, "this Protection as it is called has been a failure. It failed when wheat was 808. a quarter, and you know what the condition of the farmer was in 1817. It failed when wheat was 60s., and you know what was the condition of the farmers in 1838. And now (1845) it has failed again with the last amendments you have made in the law, for you have con- fessed what is the condition of the agricultural tenantry."

Therefore a moderate Protection only was thenceforth feasible, and moderate Protection would have availed but little in face of the revolution which the cultivation of the virgin soils of America, the cheapening of ocean transport, and the develop- ment of invention and machinery were to effect in the pro- duction of food-stuffs. To these causes are mainly, if not exclusively, due the fall of rents, the decrease of arable land, and the decay of the agricultural population of which we hear so much. But let us look at Cobden's account of things in 1843. He quoted from landlord speakers and writers on the state of agriculture, and retorted upon them :—

"It would almost appear from the testimony of your own side that you are doing nothing right. There is nothing about your agriculture which does not want improving Last week, in addressing the farmers of Cheshire I said I could bring a jury of Scotch agriculturists before the House of Commons—if their verdict could be taken there—who would state upon oath that the surface of Cheshire would, if properly cultivated, yield three times the amount of its present produce. If you were travelling by the railroad and marked the country from Stafford to Whitmore, and then from Whitmore to Crewe, and thence the thirty miles to Manchester, I challenge all England to show such a disgraceful picture ; three-fourths of the finest fields left to the undisputed dominion of rushes, not-a, shilling spent in draining—although it is now universally acknowledged that draining is the means of doubling the productions of such soils—hedgerows of every imaginable shape but a straight line, and fields of every con- ceivable form but the right one."

The condition of the labouring population—their starvation, their miserable clothing and filthy housing—was an even more crushing indictment of protected landlordism. On this head we must refer our readers to the speech numbered IX. (pp. 77-85 of this volume), as to which we need only say that Protectionist Members for agricultural districts might with reason object to its dissemination among their constituents.

We will, however, quote one pertinent comment : "Now what kind of home customers do hon. gentlemen think these people are to the manufacturers ? "

We had marked many passages for quotation ; we have, un- fortunately, space for one only, and that not Cobden's, in conclusion. It is the opinion of the Duke of Wellington in 1832 on taxation :—" He thought taxes were imposed only for the service of the State. If they were for the service of the State, in God's name let them be paid ; but if they were not necessary they ought not to be paid, and the Legislature ought not to impose them." This maxim, with Cobden's paraphrase, "We must not tax one another for the benefit of one another," goes to the root of the matter, and its observance for fifty years has at least preserved this country from the evils of unjust taxation of the poor and of financial and Par- liamentary corruption; evils of which our people can only grasp the intensity by studying the records of their own past history, or the conditions brought about to-day in countries like the United States by Protective taxation. In such a study honestly undertaken lies the chief hope of preventing a reaction which might easily bring about the commercial downfall of this country. ,