The Descent of the Landlords. 4 1 7 



to rely strictly on constitutional resources only. Meetings of 

 delegates were convened in many of the great towns, free- 

 trade banquets promoted, interviews with, ministers arranged, 

 appeals made to the Queen, and monster processions to the 

 doors of the Parliament House organised. But Luddist and 

 Chartist violence was sternly discountenanced. Demagogues 

 resolved that the calmness displayed on the open-air platforms 

 of the League, should put to shame the passions which marred 

 the debate from the benches of the House of Commons. Poli- 

 ticians on both sides at length recognised that more was to be 

 gained by the logical reasoning of pamphlets, such as, say, 

 Thompson's Catechism^ than by legislation restrictive of free 

 speech, and the excesses of the mob. Russell's doubts were not 

 of a nature to be dispelled by the argument of force. Lord Mel- 

 bourne's was a character more open to intellectual conviction 

 than traditional prejudice. Peel did not object to free trade 

 per se, but to the injustice of withdrawing protection from the 

 Landed Interest as long as it was extended to the manu- 

 facturers. Rightly or wrongly, most of our leading statesmen 

 had come to regard the question of the Corn Laws as a 

 struggle for supremacy between two rival interests ; and all 

 they wanted was to be assured that it was something above 

 and beyond a class contest, a remedy, in fact, proposed for the 

 community as a whole, rather than for a small, greedy, and 

 noisy section of it. 



Thus even at the culmination of the contest, there were peers, 

 such as Fitzwilliam, Spencer, Radnor and Ducie, advocating 

 free-trade principles in Parliament, and squires, such as Milner 

 Gibson, Sharman Crawford, Grore Langton, etc., preaching the 

 repeal of the Corn Laws to manufacturing audiences in Man- 

 chester; while great commercial communities like Liverpool, 

 were represented entirely by Tories in the House of Commons. 



The oratory of the platform was not, however, always con- 

 ducive to logical argument. Cobden once said to a Manchester 

 audience, " There is nothing I like so much as free discussion, 

 and settling the truth by the test of reason and argument. I 

 shall never flinch meeting any man, or any body of men who, 

 as reasonable beings, are disposed to take up the advocacy of 



11. E E 



