146 THE ROARING FORTIES 



destinies of the nation. The despised common 

 people must assert themselves and be free. 

 What Cobden and Bright did not say, though 

 the harried Tories were not silent about it, was 

 that the result of free trade would be to substi 

 tute an industrial and commercial for the old 

 agricultural aristocracy in dominion over the 

 nation. 



From 1842 to 1845 bad harvests, industrial 

 depression, strikes, wide-spread poverty and dis 

 tress in England played perfectly the game of 

 the Anti-Corn-Law League. In the last of these 

 years came the frightful failure of the potato 

 crop, making imperative some drastic step to 

 mitigate the impending famine in Ireland. Peel 

 knew that if he suspended the corn duties, as 

 had been done twenty years before in an emer 

 gency, the League would be able to see to it 

 that they should never be restored. He was 

 already convinced that protection was econom 

 ically and politically wrong. There was noth 

 ing for him to do but demand of his party 

 consent to the repeal of the Corn Laws. His 

 measures for this purpose passed Parliament in 

 1846, but their passage was the death-knell of 

 the Tory party. An embittered fraction of the 

 party, inspired chiefly by the rising Disraeli, 



