QUESTIONS FOR REVIEW I. In what ways did Parliament fail to be "representative" at the opening of the nineteenth century? 2. What circumstances favored agitation of this condition? 3. What was the "Peterloo Massacre"? 4. Who was Lord Russell, and what his early relation to the reform movement? 5. What was the Test and Corporation Act, and when repealed? 6. Describe the first Reform Bill, and its effect House of Commons? upon the 7. How was the second bill treated by the Commons and by the Lords? 8. What circumstances attended the passage of the third bill? 9. How was the principle of reform extended in later years? 10. What peculiar privileges did Lord John Russell enjoy? II. How is his character shown in the use which he made of them? BIBLIOGRAPHY Life of Earl Russell. S. J. Reid. Recollections and Suggestions. Lord John Russell. History of the Reform Bill. W. N. Molesworth. VI COBDEN AND FREE TRADE [RICHARD COBDEN, born, 1804, at Dunford, near Midhurst, Sussex; died, London, 1865; after grammar school education, entered mercantile house in London, soon becoming a traveling salesman; about 1830 became founder of a cotton-printing concern at Manchester; traveled in Europe and America; wrote pamphlets on commercial and economic questions; 1838, became an ardent supporter of the Anti-Corn Law League; 1841, Member of Parliament for Stockport; advocate of free trade in the House of Commons; received popular testimonial of £79,000 in recognition of his services to the free trade cause; 1847-57, Member of Parliament for West Riding of York; advocate of arbitration and diminished expense for military purposes; 1849, Member of Parliament for Rochdale; 1860, negotiated commercial treaty with France.] The Reform Bill of 1832 invaded the privileges of the landed aristocracy by destroying in some measure their control of the House of Commons through the pocket boroughs. Sixteen years later a second blow was struck at this class through the repeal of the Corn Laws. The Corn Laws aimed to secure to English agriculturists a monopoly of the home market for grain. The wars with Napoleon, which paralyzed continental industries, stimulated those of England to abnormal prosperity. Food advanced in price, but labor was in great demand and well paid. The prospect of approaching peace in Europe, in 1813, precipitated hard times in Great Britain. The price of wheat fell and manufactures declined. The land-owning classes, then supreme in Parliament, enacted the Corn Law of 1815 for their own protection. By its provisions the importation of grain from foreign countries was practically prohibited until the price in England reached eighty shillings per quarter. Ten members of the House of Lords protested against the measure on the grounds that all restraint of trade was improper; that the restraint of trade in food was especially iniquitous; that the law would not steady or cheapen prices; and that "such a measure levied a tax on the consumer in order to give a bounty to the grower of corn, "-principles which have a modern sound. England was at that time living under a system of high protective tariffs upon imported articles of manufacture as well as of food. But in 1823-25 Mr. Huskisson succeeded in having most of the tariffs upon raw materials reduced to a fraction of the former figures, with the result that production was enormously stimulated and valuable foreign markets were opened to English commodities. His only modification of the Corn Law (in 1822) was to reduce by ten shillings the figure at which importations might begin. Later he and Canning made some progress with a "sliding scale" bill, a principle which the Duke of Wellington enacted into law in 1828. This interesting device provided that when the price in the home market reached sixty-four shillings the quarter the duty should be 23s 8d. As the price rose the duty fell. When wheat was 69s, the duty was 16s 8d, and when the price reached 73s, foreign corn might come in on payment of one shilling per quarter. As has been shown in a foregoing chapter, the past half century had witnessed a great transformation in the industrial complexion of England—from a nation chiefly agricultural it had become the center of the world's manufactures. Tens of thousands of families had removed from the farms to the cities, "following the work" in the mills and factories, and hundreds of thousands of pounds had been invested in a great diversity of industrial enterprises. The manufacturer and the mill-hand were alike interested in low prices for food. The manufacturer also saw in the high tariff on grain a barrier against the free exchange of commodities. As his output increased it became necessary for him to enlarge his market, but when he attempted to sell his goods to America and Russia the law interposed to block the bargain by excluding those grain-producing countries from selling their superfluous food-stocks in England. Apparently here was a clash between the interests of manufacturer and agriculturist. In 1836 a few thoughtful men in London, who were opposed to any restraint of trade, formed an Anti-Corn Law Association. But the metropolis was stony soil for such a plant. In 1838 a similar association was organized in Manchester, one of the new industrial cities dominated by modern ideas, crowded with factories, and populous with laboring men and women, a fit center for such an agitation as was to precede the downfall of the tax on food. In Manchester, too, in the person of a calicoprinter named Richard Cobden, the agitation found its mainspring and its clear and persuasive voice. Richard Cobden sprang from a long line of plain Sussex yeomen. His father was a farmer who became bankrupt in 1813, and the lad Richard, one of twelve children, was sent by a well-meaning relative to a Yorkshire boarding school-a sort of Dotheboys Hall. From such a rough school he passed into the rougher one of life, becoming the lad of all work in the London warehouse of the same kinsman, later a clerk, and at twenty-one a traveling salesman, or "drummer," a position for which his untiring energy and engaging sociability were high qualifications. A great reader, he was also a superior converser and a "mixer" as the present-day phrase goes, adapting himself to his company with unusual facility. John Morley records that all his friends agree that "they have never known a man in whom this trait of a sound and rational desire to know and to learn was so strong and so inexhaustible." "To know the affairs of the world was the master-passion of his life," and the knowledge which he gained and assimilated not merely in his early contact with men in his business, but in the wider journeys of observation to which he treated himself in later years, contributed much to the enrichment of his speeches and writings. At the age of twenty-four, with two other young men, whose capital like his own was little more than energy, probity, and business knowledge, he founded a firm in London for the sale of Manchester cotton prints on commission. Soon the firm was printing its own goods in Lancashire, and Mr. Cobden, prospering greatly from the first, took up his residence in Manchester, to watch over that end of the business. Though as full of affairs as any man in that hive of industry, Cobden found time to store his mind by reading and by reflection upon the knowledge gained by intercourse with his fellowmen. He visited France, Switzerland, and in 1835, America, where he foresaw a growing market for his wares, and where, as |