“There are thousands of houses in England at this moment where wives, mothers, and children are dying of hunger. Come with me and you will never rest until you give them bread,” Cobden said.
Cobden backed his facts with logic. High tariffs kept out foodstuffs and essential commodities; landowners were keeping up the price of wheat while workingmen starved. Britain was on the verge of social revolution.
So Robert Peel, the Conservative, began to reduce customs. In 1842 he set a gradually lowering scale for corn duties. He sought to shift the burden of taxation from the poor to the wealthier classes and to cheapen the necessities of life. He saw that reforms were necessary, but he wished to avoid hasty changes. And in this caution lay his undoing.
His own party fell away. The Whigs distrusted the haughty, gray-eyed Minister. What did he, a Tory, mean by “seeming” to favor lower tariffs? The Irish still hated him because he stood firm against Repeal of the Union. The Catholics opposed him because he had backed nonsectarian schools.
But the enemy who kept closest watch was Disraeli. Not for a day did this ambitious member of Parliament forget that he had been left out of the new Prime Minister’s cabinet. He took this omission as a personal slight. Hatred for Peel distorted his every move. Cleverly, coolly, calculatingly, Disraeli widened the cleavage in party ranks; he drew young aristocrats about him; he flattered them with his wit and charm, and whispered that Robert Peel, their Robert Peel, was betraying them. He was pushing the country into Free Trade. He would open the gates to a deluge that would destroy England.
In the spring of 1845 Richard Cobden had risen in the House of Commons and called for Repeal of the Corn Laws. He said that Free Trade ought to be applied to agriculture and pointed to what it had done for British manufacturing. He decried the old fallacy that wages vary with the price of bread. He thundered that there was no truth in the contention that wages were high when bread is dear and low when bread is cheap. The Conservatives drew together, their faces hardening.
But Robert Peel no longer backed the Corn Laws. He wanted the drawbridges around Britain lowered forever. But he wondered how could he, leader of the Conservative party, carry through such a revolutionary change? He decided to let the present Parliament run its course. In the next election he would appeal to the country: he would carry the fight to the people. Then they could send him back, free of all party ties and obligations, as a Free Trader.
But the weather is no respecter of parliamentary elections! The wheat crop failed in England, like the potato crop in Ireland. People were starving, and the Corn Laws locked out food. Peel called a meeting of his Cabinet, and the storm broke.
The Cobden forces were ready. They held great mass meetings, with Cobden and Bright enlisting every available speaker. Frederick Douglass addressed crowds in Piccadilly, on the docks, and in Hyde Park. He and John Bright went down into Lancashire. They talked in Birmingham and other towns and cities about the worker’s right to have bread.
Then one morning a week before Christmas, Bright burst into the rooms on Tavistock Square, waving a newspaper.