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an eloquent invective against the Corn-Law which was inflicting so much suffering upon the working classes. The assembly listened and applauded with ardor. He was requested to repeat his address on another occasion. Dr. Bowring invited the young man to come to Manchester, where a committee had just been formed among the manufacturers for the purpose of investigating the public distress and suggesting means to remedy it. Mr. Paulton was sent by this committee on a tour through the principal manufacturing districts of England, with the design of inspiring everywhere the same zeal for the same objects. The Chamber of Commerce at Manchester addressed to Parliament a petition, desiring the complete and immediate abolition of the Corn-Law. Twenty-five thousand signatures were attached to a sort of declaration of war against these acts, and a permanent association was organized among the manufacturers for the prosecution of their object. A periodical publication was established, and a staff of lecturers employed to disseminate their view, a subscription of fifty thousand pounds being promptly raised to meet the expenses of the work.

Thus began the formal organization of public feeling in behalf of an interest and an idea.

An idea, however, is nothing without a man. Immediately one was found for the dawning institution. This was Richard. Cobden, a manufacturer of printed calicoes, who had been for a few years established in Manchester, and had at once distinguished himself by his acute, upright, and fertile intellect, and by his clear, animated, natural and bold eloquence, as well as by his honorable character and industrial success. He was popular and a man of wealth, and represented the borough of Stockport in the House of Commons. That union of instinct and prompt judgment which characterizes powerful minds and true missions, taught Mr. Cobden, upon his entrance into the association, that, in order to succeed, it must become general and national, in

stead of remaining local and provincial, and that it must have for its headquarters the great centre of the country and the government, that is to say, London.

In this he succeeded, but without destroying the influence of Manchester; and the aim and principles of the association, its conditions and means of success, were debated and proclaimed in a sphere much more elevated and extensive than that in which it had originated.

At one of these meetings Mr. Cobden had been describing the Hanseatic League, and other similar associations formed in the Middle Ages for the purpose of resisting aristocratic oppression and protecting the working classes. "Why do we not have a League?" cried some one in the audience. "Yes," rejoined Cobden, "an Anti-Corn-Law League." The suggestion was promptly and enthusiastically adopted; it spread rapidly wherever the Manchester movement had penetrated; and the association henceforth had a striking name, a popular leader, unity, and grandeur. The London Times, which had hitherto taken little notice of the movement, changed its tone, and announced solemnly that the League was "a great fact; " adherents multiplied and subscriptions became daily more considerable. It was finally resolved to form a new fund of one hundred thousand pounds, and at the first meeting held in Manchester more than one-eighth of this sum was immediately subscribed.

At its very beginning, however, the League encountered a serious danger; this was the claim of the Chartists to lead in all assemblies for reform, and to proclaim everywhere their principles and their projects. They refused to enter into any alliance with the League for the purpose of obtaining free trade, the sole aim of that organization; and they plunged its chiefs, the manufacturers, into the most extreme perplexity by counselling the factory-hands everywhere to suspend work, it being certain, they said, that when all sources of production and revenue were

thus dried up, government would be forced to give way, and to grant to the working classes whatever they might choose to demand. This advice bore fruit in several weeks of idleness and disorder, fatal to the work-people themselves and dangerous for the manufacturing interest which protected free trade. Mr. Cobden and his friends deplored a disturbance. which the general distress and the ravings of the Chartist leaders had brought about; they kept scrupulously aloof from it, and gladly resumed their own work when liberty of action had been restored to them by the subsidence of the Chartist agitation, and the general return of the factory-hands to their work.

Public addresses became numerous in London, and soon in other cities of the kingdom; at stated periods the most distinguished political economists, in the presence of crowded audiences, attacked the existing legislation, claiming free trade in the name of principles and interests, of science and of charity. The violence of the orators was extreme at times, a violence possible only among a people long accustomed to the exercise of liberty within the limits of a strongly established order. Mr. W. J. Fox, who shortly after became a member of the House of Commons, spoke thus, in Covent-Garden Theatre: "It is something, it is much to many here, that, through every station, in every rank of life, the pressure is felt; the demon seems to be omnipresent, and they cannot escape his pestiferous influence. But even this is not the deadliest influence of the Corn-Laws. Did one want to exhibit it in this great theatre, it might be done; not by calling together such an audience as I now see here, but by going out into the by-places, the alleys, the dark courts, the garrets and cellars of the metropolis, and by bringing thence their wretched and famished inhabitants. One might crowd them here-boxes, pit, and galleries, with their shrunk and shrivelled forms, with their wan and pallid cheeks,

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with their distressful looks, - perhaps with dark and bitter passions pictured in their countenances, and thus exhibit a scene that would appall the stoutest heart, and melt the hardest; a scene that we would wish to bring the prime minister upon the stage to see, and we would say to him, There, delegate of majesty! Leader of legislators! Conservator of institutions! Look upon that mass of misery. That is what your laws and power, if they do not create, have failed to prevent, have failed to cure or mitigate!' And supposing this to be done,- could this scene be realized,- we know what would be said. We should be told, 'There has always been poverty in the world; there are numerous ills that laws can neither make nor cure; whatever is done, much distress must exist.' They will say, 'It is the mysterious dispensation of Providence, and there we must leave it.' I would say to the premier, if he used such arguments, Hypocrite, hypocrite! urge not that plea yet, you have no right to it. Strike off every fetter upon industry, take the last grain of the poison of monopoly out of the cup of poverty; give labor its full rights; throw open the markets of the world to an industrious people; and then, if, after all, there be poverty, you have earned your right to qualify for the unenviable dignity of a blasphemer of Providence!""

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When an idea has been thus transformed into a passion and a virtue, when the element of truth contained in it thus completely effaces and obliterates all objections and all the other truths which limit it, deliberation and discussion are at an end; there is nothing left but to act; its partisans advance; they rush forward. The League made rapid progress, recruiting new and unexpected adherents. In the agricultural regions, and notably in Dorsetshire, meetings were held of farm-laborers, those especial favorites of protection, who related their own distresses, almost equal to those of the manufacturing classes. "I be protected," cried a peasant at one of these meetings, "and I be starving!"

Sir Robert Peel followed with sympathetic but anxious eyes this great movement. A friend of the principles on which the League was founded, he was, nevertheless, shocked by the violence of its language and the impatience of its demands; he did not regard the Corn-Law as the source of all the public distress, nor free trade as a remedy for all the miseries which, in afflicting the country, grieved him to the heart. The anger and alarm of the high-Tories redoubled; their attacks against Peel for "the treason he had already consummated, and his obscure designs," became every day more violent. He was irritated rather than intimidated by these attacks; but in the midst of this party turmoil, in the presence of so many hostile or compromising passions, of so many problems and doubtful points, he judged it wiser to slacken rather than to hasten his advance in the difficult road upon which he had entered. He announced publicly that her Majesty's government did not have it in contemplation to propose extensive changes in the Corn-Laws.

The irritation of the leaders of the League was extreme; and the attacks against Sir Robert became personal. He, however, remained persistently silent, only letting the restored equilibrium of the public finances speak for him, and the progressive abatement in the tax on a great number of articles of commerce. The income-tax was, however, still maintained, and the CornLaw received no modification. The reserved character of the minister, his habits of reflection and solitary resolve, weighed equally upon his disturbed and disorganized party and upon his uneasy and suspicious adversaries. The Tories had a deepseated conviction that Sir Robert Peel was removing himself from their cause and from their control, ruled by higher considerations than the spirit of party; the Whigs dared not yet count upon his support, and sought at one time to urge him into the path where they themselves walked; at another, to supplant him in the exercise of power. All were conscious of the approach

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