454 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



creased, and did not diminish, as the farmers feared. These meas- 

 ures of Huskisson, however, were purely tentative ; and, subse- 

 quent to 1824, there was a great financial struggle in the process 

 of restoring specie payment in the Bank of England, and in the 

 bringing about conditions consistent with peace. The great Na- 

 poleonic wars in the early part of the century had thrown every 

 art and industry out of its true relation. But the method of 

 reform was not forced upon the attention of the people of Great 

 Britain until the disastrous results of the attempt to regulate 

 prices and wages by way of a high tariff, and the failure of this 

 method of promoting domestic industry and of developing a home 

 market had culminated in 1840. 



In every history of this time, the picture of the condition of 

 Great Britain is one of the most painful suffering on the part of 

 most of the working people. The land was held in the hands of a 

 very few great landholders who were protected by the corn laws, 

 and who were thus enabled to charge high prices for necessary 

 food. Great wealth had been accumulating during the period of 

 war in the development of mines, works, and factories. Individ- 

 ual wealth existed in a measure never before witnessed ; and this 

 condition misled many legislators in this country ; it deceived the 

 very elect, and doubtless led Henry Clay and other champions of 

 a high tariff to advocate the very policy which Great Britain was 

 then being forced to give up by the disastrous results which had 

 ensued. Underneath this outside show of prosperity, poverty, 

 destitution, and want existed on every side ; pauperism existed as 

 never before or since among any English-speaking people. 



At the time when Sir Robert Peel took office in 1840 it was 

 clearly proved that the very measures which had been enacted 

 for the purpose of establishing a home market and building up 

 domestic manufactures "had destroyed that market by reducing 

 the great mass of the population to beggary, destitution, and 

 want." I quote the exact words of a contemporary observer. 



Those who choose to discriminate between the leaders of the 

 two parties of the present time may read the perversion of Eng- 

 lish history by James G. Blaine, in the North American Review ; 

 and the true picture which is given by General M. M. Trumbull. 



It would be well worth while for any one who may have 

 been misled by the common errors about the influences which 

 brought Great Britain to reverse her policy in 1842, to read up the 

 economic history of that period. It can be done in a very few 

 days. All the facts are given by the radical Miss Martineau in 

 her History of Fifty Years' Peace ; by the Tory, Sir Stafford 

 ISTorthcote, in his Twenty Years' Financial Policy, explaining the 

 changes which Peel brought about; by the economist John 

 Noble's Fiscal Legislation in Great Britain; or in Carlyle's 



