The men resisted the demand and appealed to the magistrates. The employers maintained their ground and blew out their furnaces. The struggle, first confined to a small centre, soon spread. The men on strike marched into the adjacent districts and forced the coliers to join them in desisting from work. A failure in the supply of coal threw the potters in the north of the county out of employment. The neighbouring counties soon caught the contagion. The flame, kindled in the first instance in Staffordshire, rapidly spread to Cheshire, Lancashire, Warwickshire, Yorkshire, to Scotland, and to Wales. In Cheshire and Lancashire alone 150 mills were stopped, and 50,000-some persons thought 150,000 persons-were thrown out of work. Committees of public safety regulated the conduct of the mob, and decided the conditions on which labour which they were pleased to regard as necessary should be performed.1 The strike was accompanied with many acts of deplorable violence. If, however, the condition of the people and the extent of the movement be recollected, surprise will be felt that the acts of outrage were not more general, and that the conduct of those who committed them was not worse. In several towns, indeed, the mobs plundered the shops of bread and other food; in many places they were brought into collision with troops and police, and blood was shed on both sides in these conflicts. In Staffordshire, where the riots almost amounted to an insurrection, public buildings and private houses were ransacked and burned. But the vast forces which had been set in motion might have been reasonably expected to have worked more disorder. The dull embers of suffering, once kindled into a flame, might have easily produced a wider conflagration. The rio:s had commenced in July; before the end of August the disorders were virtually at an end. Work was, in most cases, quietly resumed; and the account in Sybil: "What is Diggs doing?" said Master Nixon in a solemn tone. "A-dropping wages, and a-raising tommy like fun," said Master Waghorn. Sybil, bk. vi. ch. vi. 1 Hansard, vol. lxvi. pp. 1072-1074. 2 Prentice's Hist. Corn Law League, vol. i. pp. 370 et seq. working classes relapsed into the dull despair which was the eternal condition of their lives.1 The increase When Toil plays, Wealth ceases," said Gerard. "When Toil ceases, the People suffer," replied Sybil. The great strike of 1842 proved the truth of both dicta. The prosof distress. pects of improvement which were afforded by the good harvest were destroyed by the disturbances; and the suffering of the spring was exceeded by the deeper misery of the autumn. Almost every class in the kingdom participated in the universal distress. In one town, of which particulars were given, out of eighty shipbuilders thirty-six failed; five ceased working; the wages of the carpenters whom the remainder employed fell from 335. to 21s. a week; the shopkeepers found it almost impossible to keep their shops open; the butchers sold only one-half the quantity of meat which they had disposed of the year before; the relief of the poor, which had only cost £7035 in 1837, amounted to £14,232; the charitable people of the neighbourhood contributed £2192 in money and 800 tons of coal to the relief of the distress; the few people who maintained a precarious independence were crushed by the weight of supporting their neighbours; and the rates rose to 18s. in the pound, and were equal to twothirds of the rack rental of the town.3 Sunderland, however, was only one of the towns which suffered from the distress. Throughout the length and breadth of the kingdom there was one universal wail of misery. It might have been said of Britain in 1842, as it had been said of Judah more than two thousand years before, "She hath received of the Lord's hand double of all her sins;" and no Isaiah had yet arisen to speak comfortably to the nation, and cry unto her that her appointed time was accomplished, that her iniquity was pardoned. Poverty so widespread as that of 1842 necessarily affected 1 For the riots see the papers of the day; cf. Ann. Reg., 1842, Chron., pp. 133. 149, 157, 161, 163. 2 Sybil, bk. vi. ch. v. 3 See Lord Howick's speech, Hansard, vol. lxvi. pp. 453-455. the revenue. the revenues of the State. After the changes which he had made in his Budget, Peel had expected a revenue Its effect on of £21,560,000 from the customs-he received only £20,754,185; he had expected £13,700,000 from the excise, and he received only £12,500,627. On these two great branches of the national income, which shrink and swell with the increasing or decreasing prosperity of the people, there had been a gross loss of £2,000,000. It was difficult to exaggerate the significance of these figures. Yet, in a financial sense, additional importance attached to them from a curious error into which Peel had fallen. He had failed to foresee that one moiety of the income tax would not be collected during the existing financial year. This error. however, was partly redeemed by the unexpectedly large yield of the new tax. Instead of producing £3,700,000 it yielded more than £5,000,000. Notwithstanding the universal distress, the taxable income of the country was nearly one-half greater than the sum at which Peel, relying on the statistics of 1816, had ventured on placing it.1 Attack of on Peel. This consideration, however, attracted little attention at the time. The circumstance on which politicians fastened was the serious deficit in the yield of the customs and excise. Extreme men on both sides of the House the Tories attributed this deficit to Peel. The Tories thought that the difficulties of the situation had been aggravated by the policy of the minister. The Budget of 1842, they argued, had been framed to pacify the manufacturers, and the manufacturers were the pestilent class which had produced the present misfortunes. No markets, however free trade might be, could absorb the illimitable produce of machinery moved by steam. "If we could establish a railway communication with Jupiter or Saturn, and found these planets filled with a population in want of all the necessaries of life, this country would be able to glut their markets in six weeks." 2 1 The figures will be found, in a convenient shape, in Sir S. Northcote's Twenty Years of Financial Policy-quoted hereafter as Northcote's Financial Policy-p. 376. Cf. Hansard, vol. lxviii. p. 1403, where they are given less accurately. 2 Ibid., vol. lxvi. p. 592. Nothing, it was evident, could reconcile the country gentlemen to the growth of manufactures, or to the partiality which a Conservative minister was extending to trade. Their disappointment was natural. The minister whom they had placed in power to maintain the Corn Laws had already amended them; and, as they feared, was contemplating a further amendment. They had before their eyes "the strange and lamentable spectacle of the vessel of State, navigated by the Conservatives and bearing the Conservative flag, steering a Whig course." 2 The Canada The fears which the country gentlemen entertained were partially justified by a new measure. In the year in which the new Corn Bill was passed, Stanley, as Colonial Secretary, persuaded the Canadians to place a small duty-three shillings a quarter-on American wheat, on the understanding that all flour imported from Canada should thenceforward be admitted into the markets of the United Kingdom as colonial flour, and at a reduced rate of duty of one shilling a quarter. He induced Parliament to give effect to this understanding in 1843 by passing what was known as the Canada Corn Bill. The advantages of the arrangement to the colonist were obvious; the change was, in fact, proposed in the interests of the colony, and defended by Stanley as a measure of colonial policy. Nor was it clear that the change would be disadvantageous to the agriculturist at home. Stanley himself probably imagined that America was so far off, that American agriculture was so backward, and that Atlantic freights were so high, that little flour would reach this country through Canada from the United States. But the country gentlemen refused the consolation that was thus offered to them. They saw in the new bill a fresh attack on their own interests, and the attack came not from Peel, whom they were already prepared to regard as a traitor, but from Stanley, whom some of them had thought of placing in Peel's position. Stanley, indeed, by his new measure, had done more even 1 See Lord Worsley's speech, Hansard, vol. lxvi. p. 595. Lord Stanhope, ibid., p. 263. than Peel to depress and discourage the great agricultural interest. One man, at any rate, true to his colours, retired from the Cabinet. But Knatchbull's resignation only drew increased attention to Peel's conduct. Rallying at Wallingford, the Conservatives clamoured for the defeat of the ministry which they had placed in office.1 Attack of upon Peel. The change in the Conservative policy under Peel, which was alienating the extreme Tories, did not satisfy the Liberal party. The Liberals complained that Peel had shrunk from enforcing his own conclusions. the Liberals His declarations had been made to satisfy the free traders, his measures had been pared down to content the friends of monopoly and the advocates of protection. Nothing but free trade could open a market for the manufactures of the country; and the minister had made no real advance in this direction. He had taken "the duty off caviare and cassava," and had "left corn and sugar oppressed."3 The new Corn Law had produced convulsions in the corn trade which had never previously been known. Could it be intended to adhere to a measure which had ruined the corn-jobbers, "which had ruined the farmers, by producing an unprecedented fall in prices? These questions, urged, night after night, at meetings of the Corn Law League, were formally repeated by Mr. Villiers at the opening of Parliament. But Peel only answered For the resolu- 1 For the Colonial Bill of 1842, Hansard, vol. Ixiv. p. 742. tion on which the bill of 1843 was founded, ibid., vol. lxix. p. 939. pp. 577, 689. For the Wallingford meeting, ibid., p. 316. The date and cause of Knatchbull's retirement are incorrectly given in Ann. Reg., 1849. Chron., p. 242. The Duke of Buckingham had already retired in 1842. Greville's Memoirs, second part, vol. ii. p. 79. The Canada Corn Bill became the 6 & 7 Vict. cap. 29. In 1844 Mr. Gladstone refused to extend the principles of this Act to Australia, on the double ground that Australia was not an exporting country, and that an extension of the Act would produce an agricultural panic. Hansard, vol. lxxiii. p. 1567. 2 Edin. Rev., vol. lxxvii. p. 223. 3 Cobden, Hansard, vol. Ixvi. p. 837. 4 A few days before Parliament met, on the 21st of January, Mr. Drummond, Sir Robert Peel's private secretary, was shot in Charing Cross by Daniel M'Naughton. Drummond, who had begun life as a clerk at the Treasury, had been private secretary to Robinson, Canning, Wellington, and Peel. He lingered for a few days after he was wounded. M'Naughton was tried for the |