Then the submission of despair brought quiet times until 1830, when the people again attempted to throw off the hateful yoke of barbarous laws. In the House of Commons Sir Francis Burdett denounced the Duke of Wellington as
“Shamefully insensible to the suffering and distress which were painfully apparent throughout the land.”
“O’Connell declared that many thousands of persons had to subsist in Ireland on three half-pence per day.”
A tolerably successful workingman sometimes got sixty-five cents a week, and the price of the four-pound loaf was twenty-five cents.
From 1830 to 1836 matters went from bad to worse. Business was depressed, trade stagnant, poverty severe in many parts of the country.
In 1838 a crisis came. Three-fifths of the manufacturing establishments of Lancashire shut down. Thousands of workmen were thrown adrift, moneyless, foodless, desperate.
It was then that three great men, Cobden, Bright and Villiers, seized the leadership of Discontent and began the famous crusade against Protection, as typified in the Corn Laws of Great Britain. “Vested interests,” of course, raised the usual howl.
The land monopolists stubbornly closed up in lines of sullen opposition to reform. They beat off every attack, pocketing year after year the famine prices which the people were compelled to pay for bread.