Corn-law Period 



47 



so often and so well both by contemporary and by recent writers 1 , 

 that it is unnecessary to do more than refer to it here. Its significance 

 in this connection is simply that the condition of the working classes 

 determines the kind of food which they consume, and the kind of food 

 consumed reacts upon the relative profitableness of the various branches 

 of agricultural production. 



The standard of life of the mass of the population was, as has been 

 seen, so bad in the period of dearth at the end of the eighteenth 

 century and during the Napoleonic wars at the beginning of the nine- 

 teenth, that it is hardly possible to conceive that it could be worsened. 

 Nevertheless, according to the detailed reports published, it appears 

 that a further deterioration did take place, more especially after 1834, 

 when the rate in aid of wages was abolished. Between that time and 

 the abolition of the corn-laws the food of the people was reduced to 

 a hitherto unknown minimum. "Taking the whole body of agricul- 

 tural labourers," says a Parliamentary Report of the year i84O 2 , "beef 

 and mutton, as articles of food among them, are almost unknown from 

 the north of England to the south.... When Ss. out of 15^. must be ex- 

 pended in bread and flour by a family, and the greater part of the rest 

 be expended in rent, clothing and fuel, what is there left for animal 

 food?" When after 1836 the price of corn, after a period of compara- 

 tive cheapness, rose rapidly and considerably, the consumption of meat 

 in the large towns fell, often by 30 or 40 per cent.* With rising corn- 

 prices and no corresponding rise of wages, the consumption of meat, 

 eggs, butter and cheese was always the first thing to be limited 4 . It 

 will be understood that these things had indeed become luxuries when 

 it is realised to what extraordinary means of satisfying their hunger 

 the people were often reduced. Nettles, swedes, and rotten apples 

 were requisitioned 5 . Children fought in the streets for scraps which the 

 rich would not even have offered to their dogs 6 . " I could tell you of 

 mothers dividing a farthing salt herring and a halfpennyworth of 



1 See e.g. S. Laing, National Distress, 1844, PP- 2 ^ ff-> and p. 53. Speeches by Richard 

 Cobden, 1870, Vol. I, pp. 30, 151 f., 163 ff. ; F. Engels, Die Lage der arbeitenden Klasscn in 

 England, Leipzig, 1845, pp. 314-317 ; H. Martineau, op. cit. Vol. l, pp. 510 f. ; H. Dunkley, 

 The Charter of the Nations, 1854, pp. 65 ff. ; and especially Walpole, op. cit. VoL IV, 



PP- 357 ff- 



* Report on the Handloom Weavers, Reports, Vol. XXIV, Sess. 1840 [636], p. 18. 



3 Report of the Statistical Committee appointed by the Anti-Corn Law Conference, p. 18. 



4 Report of the great Anti-Corn Law Meeting, 1842, pp. 22 f. For the small consumption 

 of meat see also B. W. Noel, A Plea for the Poor, 1841, p. 3; and Brereton, Wages etc., 

 p. 61. Cp. also the labourers' budgets given by A. Wilson Fox, in Journal of the Royal 

 Statistical Society, 1903, pp. 323-325. 



Speeches of R. Cobden, p. 164. * Walpole, op. cit. Vol. iv, p. 363. 



