IRONHORSE 89'

landlord with his antiquated corn laws alone stood between the
nation and perpetual peace and prosperity.

In 1842 Peel, faced by an acute trade slump and the threat
of a revolution in the starving north, met the situation by
reducing the sliding scale -duties on corn. During the trade
revival of the next three years he left matters as they were. But
all the while the doctrine of the Anti-Corn Law League was
gaining on his mind,1 and though he continued dutifully to
regard himself as bound by his electoral pledge to maintain the
existing duties and even denounced Cobden as a dangerous
agitator, he was already his unconscious disciple. When in the
autumn o£ 1845—one °f && wettest and most miserable in
human memory—the Irish potato crop was affected by disease,
he was ready to adopt immediate repeal as the only remedy.

For to feed Ireland, England would have to import surplus
corn from abroad, and "neither the English nor the starving
Irish could be expected to pay duty on it. Yet as was pointed out
by Stanley—the only leading member of Peel's cabinet not to be
carried away—abolition of the corn laws only took from the
starving Irish peasant with one hand what it gave with the other.
Having by an act of God been robbed of the first of his two
staple crops, potatoes, he could only be further injured by a
reduction in the price of the second, oats. In the climax of their
own industrial revolution the political rulers of Britain, now
suddenly and almost wholly obsessed by an urban viewpoint,
forgot that the people of Ireland were country, not town
producers. For the remedies they offered were calculated to
relieve the latter at the expense of the former.

Peel, like so many of his countrymen, was in the grip of an
economic theory. He saw the corn laws as a challenge to that
theory and wished to remove them. Having given his electoral
pledge to maintain them, he had regretfully decided that they
would have to stay on the Statute book until the election of a
new Parliament. But the "potato cholera," with its threat to
the Irish food supply, gave him, the first public servant of
Britain, the chance to effect the great change himself—one
which, as he now fervently believed, would set his country and
the world on the path to lasting economic prosperity. It gave
him not a reason for his action—he needed none—but a pretext.

1As early as 1843 Peel told Gladstone " that in future he questioned whether he could
undertake the defence of the Corn Laws on principle."