FREE TRADE, 1841-52 Peel.—Peel's first duty was to secure a revenue equal to the expenses of the government, a task in which the Whigs had lamentably failed. His famous Budget of 1842, introduced by the prime minister himself, established an income-tax of sevenpence in the pound. Pitt's income-tax had been explicitly a war meas ure, and had been dropped in 1815. Peel's was put forward as an emergency measure, but it has proved a permanency. This budget and those of 1845 and 1846, all three of which either abolished or drastically reduced hundreds of import and export duties, mark the substantial establishment of free trade, and of our modern system of taxation. They coincided with the turn of the tide of national prosperity. The "hungry forties" were the early forties, a time of distress quite as bad as any of the years immediately after Waterloo. Now at last the tide of mid-Victorian prosperity set in. In 1844 Peel was able to reduce the interest on nearly a third of the national debt from 31 to 3 4 per cent., and in
his Bank Charter Act reformed the functions of the Bank of England.
Ireland was, as usual, a cause of embarrassment. Peel showed sympathy by increasing the govern ment grant to the Irish Roman Catholic College of Maynooth, but this was a small matter compared with the appalling famine of 1845, occasioned by the failure of the potato crop, the staple food of an already impoverished and overpopulated island. (The popu lation of Ireland was 8,000,000, twice what it was in 1926). In the same year rain destroyed the English harvest. Ireland was starving and England could not feed her. Cobden, the lucid advo cate of the Anti-Corn Law League in the House of Commons, had already converted Peel to the policy of applying his free trade system to corn, but his electoral promises pledged him to maintain the Corn Law. He had intended to announce his conversion at the next election but Ireland forced his hand. He resigned. The Whigs, led by Lord John Russell, failed to avail themselves of the opportunity to form a "repeal" government, and Peel resumed office and carried the measure (1846) . But the triumph of his policy was the ruin of his party. Landlords predominated on the benches behind him, and they had never wholly trusted Peel, him self the son of a manufacturer and a "Conservative" (whatever that might mean) rather than a genuine "Tory." They found lead ers in Lord Stanley (subsequently Derby), Lord George Bentinck, and Disraeli, who attacked Peel night after night with the wittiest invective ever heard in the House of Commons. The rebels and the Whigs combined to defeat Peel on the very night on which his "repeal" measure was reluctantly piloted by the Duke of Welling ton through a reluctant House of Lords. Henceforth the rebel Tories were the Tory Party, and the faithful became known as the Peelites, a distinguished but diminishing "third party," of whom one was Gladstone. (See CORN LAWS.) Factory Acts.--The Russell Government (1846-52) was un distinguished in domestic policy and unsuccessful in its well-meant efforts to alleviate distress in Ireland, where eviction of bankrupt tenants and emigration to America assumed gigantic proportions. Two important measures mark these years. The repeal of the Navigation acts
administered a further dose of free trade (for the Acts restricted British commerce to British ships), and ended a system as old as the Commonwealth, and in principle older. The other important measure, the Factory Act of 1847, owed nothing to the favour of the government, but crowned the labours of a lonely, austere philanthropist, Ashley (subsequently Lord Shaftesbury), who, so far as he was a party man at all, was a high Tory. Ashley's first Factory Act (1833) had failed from lack of factory inspectors. His Mines Act of 1842 had prohibited the underground labour of women of all ages and of boys under ten. The act of 1847 prohibited factory labour for women and for lads under 18 for more than ten hours a day. In practice factory convenience generally extended the same privilege to men. These reforms were carried in the teeth of the intellectual convictions of the politicians of both parties; for all orthodox politicians at that date favoured "freedom," laissez-faire, non-interference, in all de partments of industry. But there were landlords who were glad to get their revenge on the manufacturers who had secured the abolition of the Corn law ; and there were also the appalling facts about child-life revealed by the official enquiries preceding these acts. Ashley, in securing government commissions of enquiry, forced the facts into the daylight, and the facts were eloquent. The age of statistics was beginning.
Palmerston, the Whig foreign minister, en livened politics, embarrassed his colleagues, and gradually estab lished his position as the most popular statesman since Pitt. In the Grey-Melbourne governments he had powerfully assisted the lib eration of Belgium from union with Holland and the extrication of Turkey from the clutches of Mehemet Ali, the ambitious Khe dive of Egypt. He now quarrelled (on good grounds) with Louis Philippe, thus hastening the downfall of that insecure monarch, and sent a naval squadron to Athens to support the (mainly fraudulent) claims of a British Jew named Don Pacifico. The occasion was trivial, but Palmerston's triumphant vindication of a policy of supporting British subjects against foreign oppres sion in every quarter of the globe was a sign of the times. The bellicosity of the Crimean War was approaching. "Old Pam's" policy was his own, and took little account of the wishes either of his colleagues or of the queen, now the ardent pupil of her husband, who was himself a specialist in foreign affairs. Pal merston made a false, because unpopular, move when he con gratulated Prince Napoleon on his coup d'etat at the end of 1851, and was dismissed, but he scored his "tit for tat," as he called it, by securing Russell's defeat in the next year. The brief Govern ment of Lord Derby (1852) which followed was made notable by two facts. It brought Disraeli into high office, and led to the explicit abandonment of protection by the nominally protection ist party. It was defeated on Disraeli's Budget and succeeded by a coalition of Whigs and Peelites under the Peelite Lord Aberdeen.
The eleven years 1841-52 witnessed an important transformation in the world of labour. They opened with the "hungry forties" and ended with two years each of which was described by the Times as "of unexampled prosperity." It was in response to this change of conditions that working-class leaders abandoned projects aimed at revolutionary change, and sought to organize working-class prosperity within the "capitalist system"—capitalism itself making reluctant advances towards humaner methods through the Factory Acts. The final explosion and fiasco of Chartism in the Kennington Common meeting of 1848 was sensational but unimportant. The more important events are less conspicuous. In 1846 the Rochdale Pioneers established a co-operative consumers' society, which proved its right to its self-chosen title of Equitable Pioneers. Its novelty was that instead of attempting the impossible task of sell ing at cost price, it sold at market price and returned profits to its customers in "dividend," this being often left to accumulate as share capital. Co-operative production was more hazardous and less successful. The same year, 1846, saw the establishment of the Registry of Friendly Societies, and the Permanent Building Society to enable the thrifty to buy their own houses.
When Owen's unseaworthy Grand National Consolidated Trades Union suffered shipwreck in 1834, many small local "craft" unions were formed from among its disappointed members, and these subsequently found strength in amalgamation. The model of such was the Amalgamated Society of Engineers (1851), pro viding for strikes, unemployment, sickness, and superannuation. It fought and lost, with much public sympathy and assistance, a notable three months' strike in 1852.
Peel's conversion to free trade in corn created scarcely more excitement than John Henry New man's conversion to Roman Catholicism in the previous year. The celebrity of this event is not so much evidence of the great ness of Newman as of the fact that the Early Victorian was essentially a theological age. The Oxford Movement, in which Newman had been a leader, seemed to have ended, but it was in fact entering a wider world as the Anglo-Catholic movement. Among its by-products was a renewed interest in and respect for the Middle Ages, which also found expression in Carlyle's Past and Present (1842). The first volume of Ruskin's Modern Paint ers appeared in the following year, and Victorian Gothic in all its strange varieties was soon to adapt itself to churches, hospitals and railway stations. Another churchman as notable as Newman was Thomas Arnold, the great headmaster of Rugby, who died in 1842. Henceforth the public schools were to be transformed into centres of earnest endeavour and manly decorum, and the growth of railways was to multiply many times over the public which made use of them. One of Arnold's pupils, Thomas Hughes, author of Tom Brown's Schooldays, was, with F. D. Maurice and Charles Kingsley, a leader of the little group of churchmen who, with bold defiance of popular prejudice, called themselves "Chris tian Socialists" (1848) . The church, they held, had other work to do besides defining doctrines and saving souls at home, and con verting the heathen abroad ; it had to apply gospel standards to industrial organization and substitute co-operation for compe tition, and though these idealists failed, a bond was established between church and labour.
But "prosperity" rather than "prob lem" was the note sounded by the Great Exhibition of 1851, housed, in Hyde Park, in the Crystal Palace afterwards trans ferred to Sydenham. The event illustrated the fact that the Prince Consort, while fighting a losing battle for the control of purely political issues, was discovering a new, career for royalty as the representative of the nation in matters which the parties agree to place above and beyond controversy. Free traders were inclined to regard the new prosperity as a product of free trade. Free trade played a part, but a greater part was played by the now essentially completed system of main-line railways. Hitherto old-world transport had stifled the output of steam production : steam transport enabled steam production to go full-steam ahead. That the demand of the consumer might some day prove unequal to absorbing the supply of the producer was not foreseen; and excusably, for it was a problem of the loth century.
