THE LATE AND THE PRESENT MINISTRY.
Our sentiments with regard to the change of policy on the part of Sir Robert Peel and his coadjutors, were early, and we hope forcibly, expressed. We advocated then, as ever, the principle of protection to native industry and agriculture, not as a class-benefit, but on far deeper and more important considerations. We deprecated the rash experiment of departing from a system under which we had flourished so long—of yielding to the clamours of a grasping and interested faction, whose object in raising the cry of cheap bread, was less the welfare of the working man, than the depression of his wages, and a corresponding additional profit to themselves. The decline of agricultural prosperity—inevitable if the anticipations of the free traders should be fulfilled—seems to us an evil of the greatest possible magnitude, and the more dangerous because the operation must be necessarily slow. And in particular, we protested against the introduction of free-trade measures, at a period when their consideration was not called for by the pressure of any exigency, when the demand for labour was almost without parallel, and before the merits of the sliding-scale of duty, introduced by Sir Robert Peel himself in the present Parliament, had been sufficiently tested or observed. Those who make extravagant boast of the soundness and sagacity of their leader cannot deny, that the facts upon which he based his plan of financial reform, were in reality not facts, but fallacies. The political Churchill enunciated his Prophecy of Famine, not hesitatingly nor doubtfully, but in the broadest and the strongest language. Month after month glided away, and still the famine came not; until men, marvelling at the unaccountable delay, looked for it as the ignorant do for the coming of a predicted eclipse, and were informed by the great astrologer of the day that it was put off for an indefinite period! Now, when another and a more beautiful harvest is just beginning, we find that in reality the prophecy was a mere delusion; that there were no grounds whatever to justify any such anticipation, and that the pseudo-famine was a mere stalking-horse, erected for the purpose of concealing the stealthy advance of free-trade.
If this measure of free-trade was in itself right and proper, it required no such paltry accessories and stage tricks to make it palatable to the nation at large. Nay, we go further, and say, that under no circumstances ought the distress of a single year to be assigned as a sufficient reason for a great fiscal change which must derange the whole internal economy and foreign relations of the country, and which must be permanent in its effects. There is, and can be, no such thing as a permanent provision for exigencies. Were it so, the art of government might be reduced to principles as unerring in their operation as the tables of an assurance company—every evil would be provided for before it occurred, and fluctuations become as unknown among us as the recurrence of an earthquake. A famine, had it really occurred, would have been no apology for a total repeal of the corn-laws, though it might have been a good reason for their suspension. As, however, no famine took place, we take the prophecy at its proper value, and dismiss it at once to the limbo of popular delusions; at the same time, we trust that future historians, when they write this chapter of our chronicles, will not altogether overlook the nature of the foundation upon which this change has been placed.
It requires no great penetration to discover how the repeal of the corn-laws has been carried. The leaders of a powerful party who for ten years misgoverned the country, were naturally desirous, after an exile of half that period, to retaste the sweets of office—and were urged thereunto, not only by their own appetites, but by the clamour of a ravenous crew behind them, who cared nothing for principle. While in power, they had remained most dogmatically opposed to the repeal of the corn-laws. Lord Melbourne denounced the idea as maniacal—he was supported in that view by almost every one of his colleagues; nor was it until they found themselves upon the eve of ejectment, that any new light ever dawned upon the minds of the steadfast myrmidons of Whiggery. The election of 1841, which turned them out of office made matters worse instead of better. They now saw no prospect of a restoration to power, unless they could adopt some blatant cry similar to that which formerly brought them in. Such a cry was rather difficult to be found. Their ignorance of finance, their mismanagement abroad, their gross bungling of almost every measure which they touched, had made them so unpopular that the nation at large regarded their return to office much as a sufferer from nightmare contemplates the arrival of his nocturnal visitant. Undeterred by scruple or by conscience, they would with the greatest readiness have handed over the national churches to the tender mercies of the Dissenters, if such a measure could have facilitated their recall to the pleasant Goshen of Downing Street. It was not however, either advisable or necessary to carry matters quite so far. Midway between them and revolution lay the corn-law question once despised but now very valuable as a workable engine. The original advocates of abolition were not prime favourites with the Whigs. The leaders of that party have always been painfully and even ludicrously particular abut their associates. Liberal in appearance they yet bind themselves together with a thin belt of aristocratic prejudice and though insatiable in their lust for public applause, they obstinately refuse to strengthen their coterie by any more popular addition. They found the corn-law question in the hands of Messrs Cobden, Bright and Wilson—men of the people—who by their own untiring energy and the efforts of the subsidiary League, had brought the question prominently forward, and were fighting independent of party, a sort of guerilla battle in support of their favourite principle. Our regard for these gentlemen is not of the highest order, but we should do them great injustice if we did not bear testimony to the zeal and perseverance they have exhibited throughout. These are qualities which may be displayed alike in a good and in an evil cause; and yet earnestness of purpose is at all times a high attribute of manhood, and enforces the respect of an enemy. With the constitution of the League we have at present nothing to do. The organization and existence of such a body, for the purposes of avowed agitation, was a fact thoroughly within the cognisance of ministers—it was checked, and is now triumphant, and may therefore prove the precursor of greater democratic movements.
The question of the corn-laws was, however, emphatically theirs. A body of men, consisting almost entirely of master manufacturers, had conceived the project of getting rid of a law which interfered materially, according to their views, with the profit and interests of their class. Their arguments were specious, their enthusiasm in the cause unbounded. They spared no exertions, grudged no expense, to obtain converts; they set up gratuitous newspapers, hired orators, held meetings, established bazars—in short erected such a complicated machine of agitation as had never before entered into the minds of democrats to conceive. With all this however, their success, save for political accident, was doubtful. The leaders of the League were not popular even with their own workmen. Some of the simpler rules of political economy are tolerably well known among the operative classes, and of these none is better understood than the relationship betwixt the prices of labour and of food. Cheap bread, if accompanied at the same time by a reduction of wages, was at best but a questionable blessing; nor were these doubts at all dispelled by the determined resistance of the master manufacturers to every scheme proposed for shortening the hours of labour, and ameliorating the social as well as the moral condition of the poor. All that the taskmaster cared for was the completion of the daily tale. The truck system—that most infamous species of cruel and tyrannical robbery—gave sad testimony of the extent, as well as the meanness, of the avarice which could wring profit even from the most degraded source, and which absolutely sought to establish, here, within the heart of Britain, a slavery as complete and more odious than that which is the disgrace of the American republic. It is, therefore, not to be wondered at if the great mass of the working population regarded the proceedings of the Anti-Corn-law League with apathy and indifference. For, be it remarked, that the original Leaguers were by no means thorough-paced free-traders. Their motive was to deal most summarily with every restriction which stood in the way of their business, both as regarded export and import, and the establishment of a lower rate of wages. For such purposes they were ready to sacrifice every interest in the commonwealth except their own; but they showed no symptoms whatever of anxiety to discard restriction wherever it was felt to be advantageous to themselves. They were, in fact, the aspiring monopolists of the country. In their disordered imagination, the future position of Britain was to be that of one mighty workshop, from which the whole world was to be supplied—a commonalty of cotton, calico, and iron, with a Birmingham and Manchester aristocracy.
Such was the position of the League at the moment when the Whigs, eager for a gathering-cry, came forward as auxiliaries; and yet we have some doubt as to the propriety of that latter term. They did not come as helpers—as men who, devoted in singleness of heart to the welfare of their country, were anxious to assist in the promotion of a measure which the sagacity of others had discovered—but claiming a sort of divine right of opposition, similar to that which the lion exercises when the jackal has run down the prey. Accordingly, upon the corn-laws did the magnanimous Whig lion place its paw, and wheeze out a note of defiance against all interlopers whatsoever. Henceforward that question was to be a Whig one. English agriculture was not to receive its death from the ignoble hands of Cobden and Co.
Such was the move of the Whigs in the month of November last. A paltrier one, in every sense of the word, was never yet attempted nor did the simultaneous conversion of the whole party, with scarcely more than one or two honourable exceptions, present a very creditable specimen of the integrity of her Majesty's Opposition. They had become convinced—why or wherefore was not stated—that "the time had now arrived" for a total repeal of the corn-laws, and there was an end of the matter. They were prepared to vote for it in Parliament—to go to the country with it as their rallying-cry—to adopt it, in short, as their readiest stepping-stone into office. The old champions of repeal—the Leaguers—might go about their business. The conduct of the question was now transferred into the same hands which had become imbecile and paralysed in 1841, but which had since been renovated and invigorated by a wholesome course of five years' banishment from office.
It is somewhat remarkable, but rather instructive, that the Whigs do not seem to have contemplated any other financial alteration beyond the repeal of the corn-laws. Of an equitable adjustment of clashing interests, they appear to have had no idea. It is quite true that they had been of old well accustomed to a deep defalcation of the public revenue, and the probability of the recurrence of that fact, may have been viewed by them as a mere bagatelle. From vague and general protestations of economy, we can form no proper estimate of the real nature of their plans. Economy, or that paltry system of paring, which passes with the Whigs for such, is, after all, a political virtue of minor import. What we require from every administration is the adoption of such measures only as shall tend to promote the general wealth and prosperity of the country; and, in consequence, render more easy the payment of the national burdens. Any fiscal change which affects the revenue, must, as a matter of course, affect some particular class of the community. A certain yearly sum has to be made up—no matter how—and every million which is remitted from one source of the revenue must be supplied by another. It is this necessity which renders the administration of our finances so difficult. Great Britain, when she obtained her place in the foremost rank of nations, had to pay a fancy price for that supremacy. Our system of taxation is not the growth of a few years, but of a large tract of time, embracing periods of enormous expenditure and of intense excitement. It is of the most complex and artificial nature; for the reservoir of the state is filled from a thousand separate sources, and not one of these can be cut off without occasioning a greater drain upon the rest.