POLITICAL MEMOIR.

THE STATESMAN by whom the speeches contained in these volumes were delivered holds the unique position of having uninterruptedly represented the same constituency, the constituency of Wolverhampton, for nearly half a century. And during that long ́period he has enjoyed a triumph that no other statesman has ever before enjoyed. He has seen all the leading men of the empire become converts to the principles of a great commercial policy which, fulfilling to the utmost his reiterated predictions, has freed the people from the heaviest burden of injustice that ever pressed upon a nation, and completely changed the financial and economical intercourse of England with foreign nations; but which at the beginning of his Parliamentary career, almost alone. in the House of Commons, and without support in the country,' he advocated in the face of the scorn and ridicule of all parties, and afterwards continued to advocate and inculcate with unfaltering fidelity and

consistency through years of determined and opprobrious opposition until the cause of Free Trade was gained, and the blessing of untaxed bread secured for the people.

In 1815 the Corn Laws were passed at the point of the bayonet, and their course was marked by scenes of violence resulting, on more than one occasion, in the execution of some of those who had been driven to desperation by the sufferings they endured from want of bread.

In 1846 the pressure of famine wrung from a reluctant Legislature the repeal of the Corn Laws, which the pleas of justice and expediency had been equally powerless to win from successive Governments blinded by self-interest and the superstitions

of custom.

But famine itself would have availed little against the combined strength of legislative power and landed influence had the mass of the people remained in ignorance of the real cause of the misery that was crushing them, and of the legitimate means within their own reach to compel its removal. And, even knowing the cause of their wretchedness, and aided by famine, the people would have been a very long time in making their power felt had their rulers been suffered to follow untaught and unrebuked by men of their own order the narrow lines of the selfish and destructive policy of Monopoly.

No one single cause effected the repeal of the Corn Laws, and with it the overthrow of Protection. It was not Mr. Villiers's eight years' vigorous advocacy, in and out of Parliament, of untaxed bread for the people that alone did this. Nor the influence of Sir Robert Peel; nor the 'unadorned eloquence' of Richard Cobden ; nor the untiring energy of Mr. Bright; nor the trenchant writings of Peronnet Thompson; nor the thrilling lines of Ebenezer Elliot; nor the gigantic wave of subscriptions ridden and ruled by the Member for Stockport; nor famine itself, against which we had warred, which afterwards joined us '-not any one of these alone effected Repeal. The repeal of the Corn Laws-the Devil's Laws, as the Times' boldly called them-was due, as all great measures are due, to the concurrence of numerous causes, to the united action of various agents, to the sagacity and firmness of many leaders. But Mr. Villiers will be known in history as the first leader of that band of earnest men who, with a singular grasp of fact and circumstance, clearly estimated the different forces of class interest, prejudice, and ignorance which, under the name of Protection, enthralled commerce, and kept the masses of the people constantly exposed to all the miseries of want and its consequences; and undertook the laborious task of initiating the overthrow of the pernicious system of Monopoly in the only effectual way in which it

could be undertaken: namely, by fully exposing the fallacies by which, with incalculable detriment to the community at large, a crying injustice was being maintained; and, whilst rousing the people out of the lethargy of ignorance, to guide and restrain them, in the early hours of their waking, from an unwise or unlawful use of their knowledge.

The pangs of hunger opened the eyes and ears of those who toil for the necessities of the day, and made them comparatively apt and docile pupils. But political economy is a dry study for the opulent and leisured classes. Steeped in the prejudices of 'special interests' and the fallacies of Protection, the typical landowner of the early part of this century, blind himself, blinded the farmer and the labourer dependent on him, and treated the concrete arguments of scarcity and distress which went home to the poor as if they were the mere abstractions of the theorist. 'He made everything clear, and said naething but what was perfectly true,' said the shrewd Scotchman after his first lesson from the Free Trade lecturer, and proved that the Corn Laws did us nae guid, and that their repeal would do us nae ill; but it's of nae use to convince us unless he convinces our landlords too, for we maun just do as they bid us.' Now it was precisely with this class—the great landed interest, as it was called-that Mr. Villiers had to deal directly in the first instance. And most fortunate it was that

he could do so as the representative of Wolverhampton. Together with Manchester, Wolverhampton took the lead of all the other boroughs created under the Reform Bill of 1832 in opposing the Corn Laws. And it was his representation of that great manufacturing constituency, closely connected by commercial relations with America, that, in addition to his social rank, gave weight and significance to his advocacy of Free Trade in general and the repeal of the Corn Laws in particular when as a young man Mr. Villiers was first returned to Parliament.

Mr. Villiers, the third son of the late Hon. George Villiers and Theresa, the only daughter of the first Lord Boringdon, and brother of the late Earl of Clarendon, was born in London in 1802. After studying some time at Haileybury College, with a view to an Indian career, Mr. Villiers, his health not being found sufficiently strong for India, went to Cambridge, where he graduated in 1824. At Haileybury he was the pupil of Malthus and Sir James Mackintosh; and there he not only became a diligent student of economical science, but he also showed decided bias in favour of those distinctive principles that were the foundation of his public life. His course of studies in political economy was finally completed under Mr. M'Culloch, who was then esteemed the soundest exponent of the doctrines of Adam Smith.