THE DINNER TO LORD STANLEY.
Fifteen years have elapsed since Sir Robert Peel made his memorable speech in Merchant Tailors' Hall; and the foundation was laid, in the unanimity of three hundred and fifteen independent members of the House of Commons, of that great party which at length proved triumphant in the country, and some years afterwards returned him by a majority of 700,000 out of 1,000,000 of electors, and a majority of 91 in the House of Commons, as Prime Minister of England. The victory then achieved, the triumph then gained, rendered the future a matter of comparative ease in Government, of certainty in anticipation. The nation had spoken out: Protection to Native Industry in all its branches—agricultural, manufacturing, and colonial—was the principle which had banded the majority together; and the victory was so great, the bond which united them so strong, that, for this generation at least, all attempts, by external aggression, to shake their government must have proved nugatory. England was once again united: the great cause of domestic industry of the universal people had triumphed. All that was required of its leaders was to have remained true to themselves, to have adhered to their principles, to have proved faithful to their professions; and most assuredly the great majority of the nation would have proved faithful to them. An opening was afforded, a foundation was laid, for the formation of a great National Party, which, discarding the now senseless divisions of former times, was intent only on fostering the industry of the whole working-classes of the community, and on rearing up, on the basis of experienced benefits and acknowledged blessings, a great and united British empire in every quarter of the globe.
What has prevented the realisation of so glorious a vision? what has stepped between Great Britain and the diadem encircling the earth thus presented to her grasp, and converted an empire which might now have daily, and for centuries to come, been growing in strength, overflowing with prosperity, unanimous in loyalty, into one declining in numbers, shivered in power, divided in opinion? Whence is it that, while the debates in Parliament are daily filled with the piteous, and, alas! too faithful accounts of Irish destitution, of metropolitan suffering, of agricultural distress, of industrial depression, the colonies are all meditating separation from the mother country, and Government at home, anticipating a severance of the empire which they can no longer defend, are already, like the Romans of old, abandoning the distant parts of the empire to their own resources? How has it happened that, after reading a glowing eulogium in the leading articles of the Times on the prosperous condition of the country, the increase of its exports and imports, the cheapened food of its inhabitants, we read in the next columns of the very same paper a piteous statement from Lord Ashley on the frightful condition of the working-classes in the metropolis—a heart-rending account from Mr Reynolds of the daily declining resources and increasing pauperism of Ireland—an alarming statement, from the official return, of the daily increasing importation of foreign grain, at prices below what it can be raised at in this country—a decisive proof, in the monthly return, of the decline of British and increase of foreign shipping—and Lord Grey's circular to Australia and the Mauritius, announcing the approaching withdrawal of the British troops from those valuable settlements? Whence have arisen those obvious and undeniable and well-known symptoms of national decline, immediately after the opening of so glorious a dawn, and when the means of such lasting and universal prosperity had, by the benignity of a gracious Providence, been placed within our grasp?
No one need be told from what these melancholy results, after such splendid prospects, have arisen. It is dereliction of principle which has done the whole. A statesman was placed at the helm, of great ability, of unwearied industry, of vast influence, but who wanted the one thing needful for great statesman-like achievement—singleness and consistency of principle. He rose to power by the exertions of the Conservative party; and the first use he made of that power, when fully acquired, was to spread dissension among that party, and for a time destroy their influence. He made himself not the representative of the nation, but of a section of the nation; not of the British empire in every part of the world, but of Manchester and Glasgow. To their interests everything else was sacrificed. The agricultural interest was sacrificed by the repeal of the Corn Laws; the colonial, by the equalising the duties on sugar and wood; the shipping, by the repeal of the Navigation Laws; the manufactures for the home market, by the unrestrained admission of foreign manufactured produce. The interests of no class were consulted but those of the buyers and sellers of commodities, and of the great manufacturers for the export sale, the class from whom Sir Robert Peel sprang; and as the interests of that class are on most points adverse to the interests of the rest of the community, the vast majority are now suffering for their benefit.
The time was when such an anomaly as this could not have existed. Within the lifetime of half the present generation, the interests of the merchant, the manufacturer, and the farmer were identified; and no one of these classes could be benefited without extending the impulse to all the others. The toast of "The Plough, the Loom, and the Sail," was as regularly to be heard at public dinners as that of the "British Constitution, and may it be perpetual." But now neither is heard—they have gone out of fashion together. Whence this extraordinary, this woeful change, in so short a time, and in a nation which has not been subjected to the convulsions of at least a violent and bloody revolution? It is that the principle of protection to native industry has been abandoned by the Government. A section of the community has become so rich and powerful, from the shelter afforded to it during a hundred and fifty years of protective policy, that it has succeeded in setting all other classes at defiance, and changing our policy for its own immediate benefit, but their certain decline and ruin.
This class is that of manufacturers for the export sale. When Great Britain was a self-supporting country, as it was to all practical purposes down to 1842, the growth of our manufactures, whether for the home or the foreign market, acted immediately and powerfully on the interests of all other classes, agricultural and commercial, with which they were surrounded. They eat the British or Irish farmer's bread and beef; they were clothed in the British manufacturer's clothing; the machinery they made use of was made by English hands; their goods, when completed, were exported in British bottoms; and the profits of the master manufacturers, who put the whole in motion, were for the most part spent in the purchase of British luxuries and the encouragement of British industry. Thence the universal feeling, that the interest of all classes was identical, and that you could not benefit the one without at the same time benefiting the others. But since the fatal period when protection was abandoned, this mutual dependence has been done away with—this great and beautiful bond of cohesion has been destroyed. We can no longer give "The Plough, the Sail, and the Loom," at any public dinner. Every one feels that the interests of these classes have now been set at variance. The old fable of the Sheaf of Arrows has been realised. One arrow, marked "Protection to Native Industry," has been drawn out, and the whole sheaf is falling to pieces.
It is not surprising that consequences so wide-spread and disastrous should follow the abandonment of the principle of protection to native industry; for it is the cement which alone has hitherto held together the vast and multifarious parts of the British empire. What was it, during the war, which retained all the colonies in steady and grateful loyalty to the British throne, and made even foreign colonial settlements hail with joy the pendants of our fleets fitted out for their subjugation, and in secret pray for the success of their enemy's arms? It was a sense of individual advantage—the consciousness that the Imperial Government on the throne knew no distinctions of locality, but distributed the same equal justice to the planter of Jamaica or the back-woodsman of Canada, as to the manufacturer of Manchester or the farmer of Yorkshire. All were anxious to gain admittance into the great and glorious empire, whose flaming sword, like that of the cherubim at the gate of Paradise, turned every way, and which extended to all its subjects, how distant and unrepresented soever, the same just and equal protection. Norway petitioned to be admitted into the great confederacy, and tendered its crown to Great Britain. Java mourned being shut out from it. The day when the British standard was withdrawn from the colonies, restored with imprudent generosity by victorious England at the peace of 1814, was to them one of universal mourning. There was no thought then of breaking off from the British empire; no mention of Bunker's Hill or Saratoga. The object of universal ambition was to gain admission, or remain in it.
And what were the dependencies which were then so anxious to obtain an entrance into, or retain their connection with, the British empire, and are now equally, or more solicitous, to break off from it? They were the West Indies, which at that period took off £3,500,000 worth annually of our manufactures, and employed 250,000 tons of our shipping; Canada, which has since, with 1,500,000 inhabitants, taken off above £3,000,000, and employed 1,100,000 tons of our shipping; and Australia, which now, with only 250,000 inhabitants, consumes above £2,000,000 worth of our manufactures; while Russia, with 66,000,000, takes off only £1,500,000 worth annually. So vast, various, and growing are the British colonies in every quarter of the globe, that half our export trade had become to us a home trade; and we enjoyed the inestimable advantage, hitherto unknown to any country that ever existed, of reaping domestic profits at each end of the chain which encircled the earth. This it was which held together the British empire, which preserved it intact amidst the greatest dangers, and caused the industry of the heart of the empire to grow with the growth, and strengthen with the strength, of its most distant extremities. In casting away our colonies, in destroying the bond of mutual interest which had so long held them in willing obedience to the heart of the empire, we have voluntarily abandoned our best customers; we have broken up the greatest and most growing dominion that ever yet existed upon earth; we have loaded ourselves at home with a multitude of useless mouths, which cannot find bread from the decline of the colonial market, and let the boundless fields of our distant provinces remain waste for want of the robust arms pining for employment at home, which might have converted them into an earthly paradise, and these islands into the smiling and prosperous heart of an empire which embraced half the globe.
The emigration which has gone on, and has now increased to 300,000 a-year, has done little to obviate these evils: for, since protection to our colonies has been withdrawn, four-fifths of it has gone to the United States, where the principle of protection to native industry is fully established, and constantly acted upon by their Government.