The details of this famous struggle are not to be stated here. One or two quotations will indicate the Liberal temper of the Free Traders. The Radicals attacked the Corn Law in Radical language. "It is the duty of Parliament," said Hume, "equally to protect all the different interests in the country.... Are we warranted in giving to one particular interest a monopoly against the other interests? I see no reason for giving the capital employed in agriculture greater protection than the capital vested in other branches of trade, manufacture, or commerce."[[250]] The manufacturers hated the landowners with a more personal hatred. They had little respect for these ignorant country gentlemen who maintained their own dignity at the expense of the manufacturer's capital and the workman's life. "The sooner the power in this country is transferred from the landed oligarchy, which has so misused it, and is placed absolutely in the hands of the intelligent middle and industrious classes, the better for the condition and destinies of this country."[[251]] The Corn Law was described as saying to the people, "Scramble for what there is, and if the poorest and the weakest starve, foreign supplies shall not come in for fear some injury should be done to the mortgaged landowners."[[252]] "The labourer's bones and muscles are his own property, and not the landlord's. We claim for ourselves that which we concede to him—the fair produce of whatever power, privileges, or advantages we possess. Here our principle claims the same respect, the same sacred veneration, for the rights of property of the man who has nothing in the world but the physical strength with which he goes forth in the morning to earn his dinner at noon, and that of the inheritor of the widest and most princely domain which can be boasted of in this country of Great Britain.... There is no doubt that any duty on the importation of corn must enhance the price of food; and whatever enhances the price of food takes away from the fair earnings
of the industrious."[[253]] The victory of the Anti-Corn Law League meant the victory of the people over the landowners.
But that victory was emphasized not only by the triumph of principle, but by the triumph of organization. The fighting was done almost entirely by Cobden and Bright outside Parliament. Both of the leaders, with Hume, Villiers, and other members, made speeches in Parliament. But the real work was done by the League, which was founded in 1838, and for eight years carried on an indefatigable but orderly campaign in the country. It bore some resemblance to the Political Unions which had supported the great Reform Bill. But those Unions had been massed behind the official Whig Opposition. The League had very few Members of Parliament at its head, and not one of those was within the circle of Whig favour. The Unions had forced their policy upon the Tory party. The League forced its policy upon Parliament. So far as active assistance was concerned the Opposition was no more to the Free Traders than the Government. Both official parties looked upon it with suspicion, and the old jealousy of popular organization which had faced the Corresponding Society and the Catholic Association was displayed by Whig as well as by Tory landlords. The lecturers of the League were denounced, not only as "commercial swindlers," but as "the paid hirelings of a disloyal faction," and "revolutionary emissaries," who inflamed the public mind "with sentiments destructive of all moral right and order."[[254]] In 1843 the League was accused of promoting a strike of factory hands in the North, and of rick-burning by agricultural labourers in the South, and it was rumoured that the Government intended to suppress it, as it suppressed the Catholic Association. It was not until Lord John Russell published his manifesto in favour of repeal in 1845 that a Member of Parliament of official rank openly allied himself with the League. Once the leaders of Opposition had given way the work was easy. The political centre of gravity was thus shifted from Westminster to the
country. It was no longer open to Parliament to decide policy, and to direct the fortunes of the nation as it thought fit. Not even Opposition could make a free choice of the topics of controversy and of legislation. It became the duty of members to observe the main currents of opinion, to check and deflect them, but no longer to originate them. They must look in future, not to their leaders, but to their constituents, for the principles which were to direct their conduct. The people were brought into direct touch with politics, and asserted their right, not only to censure their representatives by unseating them at elections, but positively to influence their actions while they sat in the House.
An equally remarkable feature of the League, though its immediate political importance was much less, was its use of a women's branch, which took an active part in the work. This was the first organized employment of women in practical politics. The women who took part in Reform demonstrations like that of Peterloo belonged to an impotent class, and did little active work. The women of the Anti-Corn Law League did not make speeches.[[255]] But short of appearing on public platforms they did the same kind of work as their men. Politics were at last acknowledged by the most powerful class in the State to be women's work as well as men's. For the moment there was no demand that women should control their own political affairs. But the one step followed inevitably from the other. It was impossible that a woman of strong character should thus engage in a strenuous political agitation without acquiring some of that desire for personal control which is the essence of democratic politics. Among the men of the League there were probably few who would have allowed women to work with them except as subordinates, and the supporters of the women used language which showed that they were not very far removed from the eighteenth century. "I offer no apology," quaintly says the historian of the League, "for the course they took, for I never
had the smallest doubt of its perfect propriety and its perfect consistency with the softer characteristics of female virtue."[[256]] It did not occur to him that, even if it had been inconsistent with those softer characteristics, it might still have been consistent with the desire of the women to use their natural powers as they themselves, and not as he, thought fit. Men had not yet got to the point of allowing women to regulate their own lives in their own way. But when they admitted that they might safely take part in serious public business, they sowed seed which has since borne much fruit. The modern Women Suffrage movement began in those Northern districts where the League was powerful, and it has made least impression in those quarters where the League was weak.
The repeal of the Corn Law was the greatest practical achievement of the Manchester School. In other matters they divided the credit with the Radicals, who were avowed followers of Bentham, and with the Peelites, who were often Utilitarian in practice though not in theory. So far as domestic policy was concerned their Liberalism was of the negative and incomplete kind. An attempt had been made in 1835 to establish agricultural training schools and model farms in Ireland. It was not enough to relieve the distress of that miserable land, but it attacked one of its most urgent problems in the right way. The Manchester men objected to their support of a particular industry by the State, and Peel and the Benthamites took the same side. In 1844 Peel ended the system of practical instruction, and the model farms were nearly all abandoned. In the same temper the Manchester School opposed Shaftesbury's Factory Bills, and if Free Trade is the best thing which they did for their country, their resistance to Factory legislation is the worst. Many of them accepted restrictions on the hours of child labour. But anything which forced the employer to regulate his buildings or his machinery or his processes in the interests of the health or safety of his workmen was opposed fiercely and persistently by the majority. They objected to any interference with adult
men. On a motion to inquire into the condition of journeymen bakers, Bright once spoke with a most unpleasant flippancy. "He did not see how Parliament was to interfere directly and avowedly with the labour of adult men.... He should be ashamed to stand up in defence of about two hundred stalwart Scotchmen, who could publish a Gazette of their own, and write articles in it of considerable literary merit, and appeal for a remedy to that House."[[257]] He and his associates overlooked the fact that the difference between a man and a woman or a child was only a difference of degree. They misunderstood the principle of all legislation of this kind. Women and children were protected not because they were women and children, but because they were economically weak. They were not organized, they were poor, and their employers could use them as they pleased. Any class of men which was economically weak was morally entitled to the same protection. To say that they were adult men was no answer to a complaint which had nothing to do with sex or age. Maleness did not of itself prevent either long hours or dirty premises. Here Radicals and Manchester men failed, and by 1867 Parliament had got no farther than to prohibit the employment of children under eight years, to restrict the hours of labour of women and youths under eighteen to ten or twelve hours a day, and to impose conditions about sanitation, ventilation, and the fencing of machinery upon some of the more unhealthy or dangerous trades. This progress, qualified by many exemptions, was all that could be won in the face of individualist opposition to economic reform.[[258]] But in another quarter the different schools of individualists were united with conspicuous success.
The most complete and the most successful application of Liberal principles during this period was in the reconstruction
of the colonial system. The American Rebellion and the restoration of Canada had been isolated examples, the first of Liberal defeat, the second of Liberal victory. But by the middle of the century this casual wisdom had been developed into a deliberate and consistent policy. The growth of the other Colonies at the Cape, Australia, and New Zealand forced upon the Home Government the reconsideration of their methods of transacting colonial business. The Cape had been taken from the Dutch during the French War. Australia and New Zealand had been discovered at the end of the eighteenth century, and by 1840 were both recognized as British Colonies. The Government were then faced with the same problem as that which had confronted them in America. The old system was government by the Colonial Office, and in one respect it had been more deliberately egoistic than in any other part of the world. The Australian Colonies had for a long time been used as a dumping ground for social rubbish. The people for whom the Home Government could not provide in England, it had been accustomed to send to New South Wales, to Western Australia, and to Van Diemen's Land. A large part of the population of these countries consisted partly of transported convicts and partly of paupers whom public or private money had enabled to emigrate. As Sir William Molesworth bluntly described it, "Colonial Office colonization consists in the transportation of convicts and the shovelling out of paupers."[[259]] The time was at length reached when the independent emigrants and the descendants of earlier settlers who were themselves of good character protested against this use of their country without their own consent.[[260]]