in the policy in which he had been trained. The necessity for a
change of commercial policy grew out of the altered conditions in
the nation. The agricultural England of the eighteenth century
had in a generation been transformed into a hive of manufacturing
industry. The rapid adoption of steam power and improved
machinery in England on the one hand, and the paralysis of
industry on the Continent during the Napoleonic wars, had wrought
the change, while the commercial marine, guarded by her powerful
navy, had brought the carrying trade of the world under her flag.
The weakest point in the English system was the protective
tariff, which lay heaviest on imports of grain--or "corn," to use
the insular term. The Corn Laws were a body of legislation
enacted from time to time by Parliaments which were controlled by
the great land-owning interests. The land-owner, whose income was
derived chiefly from rents upon agricultural lands, consistently
favored a scale of tariffs which would maintain the price of
cereal grains at the highest figure. At the close of the great
war (1815) the nation was confronted with business disaster. "War
prices" for grain fell rapidly, the markets were stocked with
more manufactured goods than impoverished Europe could absorb,
while the English labor market was glutted by the influx of
several hundred thousand able-bodied soldiers and sailors in
quest of industrial employment. As early as 1821 Mr. Huskisson, a
cabinet colleague of Mr. Canning, had endeavored to lighten the
burden of British manufactures by reducing the import duties upon
the raw material used by the English looms. He was for getting at
the root of the matter and disposing of the Corn Laws, so as to
provide "free food" as well as "free raw materials," but his Tory
companions believed that such legislation would vote the bread
out of their own mouths. In 1838 an Anti-Corn Law Association was