starving the British labourer. Those who upheld this plan were called ‘Protectionists’; those who wished to admit cheap foreign corn were called ‘Free Traders’.
Agitation against them.The ‘Corn Laws’ became the subject of an agitation far fiercer than that for Reform of Parliament, and with much more reason. Over and over again there was danger of a rising of the poor labourers against all who owned or farmed land. Even when there was not a bad harvest, and when the price of corn was far below the 80s. a quarter, it was easy for agitators to persuade the poor that they must be very badly off; and, especially in the days before the Reform Bill, the outcry of the poor against the rich was a most distressing feature of the age. You cannot expect much reason from people who are really hard up for food, or who expect to be hard up for food in a few months. At last, in 1845, there appeared the most manifest symptoms of a coming famine in Ireland, owing to the failure of the potato crop. Their repeal, 1846.Sir Robert Peel, who was then in power, and who had hitherto been a moderate ‘Protectionist’, turned right round, and in 1846 abolished the Corn Laws altogether. He was too late to save Ireland from famine, which came in all its horrors in 1847, and, by death or emigration to America, reduced the Irish people by more than a third of their numbers. But he believed that he had saved any portion of our islands from the chance of such a disaster for the future.
Decay of agriculture.For a long time after the abolition of the Corn Laws, it still paid the farmers to grow corn in Britain. But as the empty lands of America and Canada came to be more and more peopled and cultivated, and when the introduction of steamships brought down the cost and shortened the time needed to bring corn across the
