If the attorney’s family needs a new kitchen, shouldn’t he do the job himself, since he is twice as productive as the average carpenter? Not when his legal skills are worth $1,000 per hour. In the hundred hours he spent on the kitchen, he could have earned $100,000 in his office. He is far better off hiring the less efficient carpenter for two hundred hours, which would cost him only $5,000. Put a different way, the attorney is better off working five hours in his own profession to pay for the carpenter to do the kitchen job than working one hundred doing it himself. In economic terms, the attorney has a comparative advantage in legal work and a comparative disadvantage in woodworking. (Note that pleasure and preference do not enter into Ricardo’s analysis. Our attorney may enjoy carpentry and decide to do the job himself—a valid emotional choice, but not an economically rational one.)
Alas, Principles, and Ricardo himself, arrived too late to save England from the draconian Corn Law of 1815. In response to a pro-Corn Law tract by Thomas Malthus, Ricardo wrote an anti-Corn Law pamphlet, “An Essay on the Influence of a low Price of Corn on the Profits of Stock.” In it, he pointed out that the major advantage of the “real” England (as opposed to the hypothetical England of Principles) lay in its factory machinery. The corn laws, he wrote, impeded the purchase of foreign grain and forced England to waste its precious labor in less productive farmwork. This benefited no one except the landowning aristocracy. Ricardo’s pamphlet convinced few. His more influential Principles did not appear in print until 1817, and he himself did not enter Parliament until 1819.
The thought of German, Polish, and Danish warehouses bulging with cheap grain incited England’s working poor. In the end the mob proved more influential than the forces of rational discourse, but not in the direction intended. In March 1815, anti–Corn Law rioters raged through London’s streets and broke into the houses of the bill’s supporters, including those of Lord Castlereagh, the notoriously repressive foreign minister, and Frederick Robinson, who had introduced the bill. In the aftermath of the French wars, starving workers rioted for free trade, just as today more comfortable workers riot against it. Their lawlessness proved similarly counterproductive, forcing pro-repeal politicians and newspapers to disown their raucous allies.
In 1815 the landed interests ruled the day. That year’s infamous legislation, whose passage required not only majority votes in both houses but also fixed bayonets outside them, absolutely forbade grain imports when wheat fell below eighty shillings per quarter.66 Not long after, grain prices briefly fell well below eighty shillings, and Ricardo participated in a successful rearguard action through further pamphleteering and speeches in the Commons against the demands of landowners for even more protection.67 He died in 1823 at age fifty-one, his dream of global free trade unfulfilled.
Protectionist legislation usually strikes hardest at the weak and powerless, and the Corn Law of 1815 was no exception. Since the price of wheat rarely rose above eighty shillings in peacetime, and since England’s agricultural self-sufficiency was rapidly disappearing, the act effectively kept foreign grain out and forced England’s poor to pay an artificially inflated price for their daily bread. The subsequent enforcement of the act did not cause the kind of violence attending its passage, but expensive grain was still high on the list of grievances behind the political reform efforts in postwar England. These efforts often turned nasty, as in the “Peterloo Massacre” of 1819, a senseless attack by panicked constables at a peaceful demonstration in Manchester.68, 69
Later in the nineteenth century, the increasingly prosperous manufacturers, who would benefit from cheap grain with which to feed their hungry labor force, began to challenge the landed aristocracy. In 1828, the Lancashiremen rammed through a bill that replaced the rigid eighty-shilling barrier with a more gradual sliding scale, similar to that of 1804.70 By 1840, the intellectual tide had clearly turned in favor of free trade, yet the new act, albeit somewhat less brutal than that of 1815, still plagued England’s hungry poor. An unlikely visionary, Richard Cobden, administered the coup de grâce to the statutes, and his ultimate success still speaks volumes about today’s controversy over globalization, as well as the democratic process in general.
Cobden was born to a poor family of yeoman farmers in 1804, and would enter public life at the right time—in the wake of the Reform Act of 1832. At age ten, Richard experienced his father’s loss of the family farm. His uncle, a cloth merchant, packed him off to the sort of boy’s institution made notorious by Charles Dickens. (On later reading Nicholas Nickelby, Cobden felt a shock of recognition at the novel’s boarding school, Dotheboys Hall.71) At fifteen, he was apprenticed as a clerk to his uncle, a calico merchant, and by age twenty he was traveling the countryside selling printed cottons. By age thirty he and his older brother Frederick had established their own printing factory in Manchester and became men of independent means.
Although he undoubtedly had the talent to do so, Cobden never acquired great wealth, enjoying intellectual pursuits, travel, and politics far more than the cotton trade. By thirty-three he had been to the Continent, the Middle East, and the United States, recording of the last, “If knowledge be power, and if education give knowledge, then must the Americans inevitably become the most powerful people in the world.”72 His travels taught him that England could prosper if only it was able to sell its manufactures cheaper than other nations. Military intervention consumed taxes, which drove up the price of England’s exports, and spending too much for expensive protected domestic grain to feed English workers did the same. Both damaged the nation.73 From this reasoning naturally flowed his belief in pacifism, international cooperation, and, most importantly, free trade. By 1840, Britain sent one-third of its exports—mainly cotton fabric and clothing—to the United States, in return for the South’s raw cotton. It did not escape the young factory owner that this trade demanded no expensive naval protection.
Cobden was hardly alone in these sentiments. By the 1830s, two very strange bedfellows had also arrived at the conclusion that the Corn Law had to go: the Manchester cotton interests and the Chartists, a group of often lawless radicals dedicated to broadening the voting franchise beyond the landholding aristocracy. In September 1838, representatives of these two groups met in Manchester and founded the Anti-Corn Law League. The best-known free-trader in England, Cobden, assumed its leadership later that year.74
In 1838 the League found itself in the right place at the right time. Before the 1830s, communication and transportation were prohibitively expensive. A world in which only the wealthy can write letters or travel long distances utterly disenfranchises those unable to do so. In England, this meant that the entrenched, established landholders easily held the upper hand in their struggle with poor consumers for protection of grain.
The era’s rapidly evolving technologies, particularly steam power, greatly reduced this imbalance. The Anti-Corn Law League was now able to send its charismatic speakers—the charming, persuasive Cobden and the fiery, emotional John Bright—speeding around the country to organize and marshal support.
The League developed many of the sophisticated tools used by today’s major political parties and special-interest groups: mass mailings, carefully choreographed traveling campaigns, exploitation of religious subtexts, meticulous polling, and targeted legal challenges.
Soon after assuming the League’s leadership, Cobden found himself in the company of another visionary of humble background, Rowland Hill, a passionate advocate of the “penny post.” By 1838 England was well on its way to being served with high-speed rail transport, which radically reduced carrying costs. The government, however, did not pass the savings along to letter writers. In those days, postage was paid by the recipient and came dear: a letter sent from Edinburgh to London, for instance, cost a shilling—almost a day’s wages for a farmer or factory worker.
Payment by the recipient and high costs led to all sorts of expediencies and abuses. Travelers routinely carried letters for friends, relatives, and
strangers, and several letters would be written on a single sheet that was sent to a distant city, where it was then cut up and sent onward to different recipients there. Books sent from printer to shop carried much of the mail, sandwiched among their pages. Employees had their mail addressed to their workplace, and legislative franking—the privilege of sending letters free of postage—was one of the important perks of public office.75
Hill reckoned that it cost the Post Office only one thirty-sixth of a penny to carry a letter from London to Edinburgh, and Cobden soon found himself persuaded by Hill to apply his legendary charm and persuasive skill for the benefit of a select committee of the Commons. Cheaper postage, Cobden told the committee, would allow the fifty thousand Irish working in Manchester to regularly write to their loved ones back home; when members questioned whether the Post Office could manage such a volume of letters, he coolly informed them that an elephant had recently been sent by rail from London to Manchester at twenty miles per hour.
Parliament passed the penny post measure, and it was put into operation on January 10, 1840. At first, confusion reigned over exactly how to implement the scheme; Cobden suggested “something similar to the stamp on patent medicines, something to be affixed by the party with gum on the envelope, then stamped at the post office,” the result being modern adhesive postage.76
Cobden knew exactly what he was doing; when the penny post finally cleared the House of Lords, he is said to have shouted for joy, “There go the Corn Laws!”77 Inexpensive mail became the most powerful weapon in the arsenal of the repeal forces, a veritable propaganda howitzer. Further, the Anti-Corn Law League could tap into the wealth of the mill owners, the very wellspring of the Industrial Revolution’s riches. The combination of generous funding and cheap postage enabled the League to blanket England’s pitifully small number of voters—just 7 percent of adult males after the Reform Act of 1832.78 The barrage was systematic and monotonously regular. It featured a daily newspaper, The Anti-Corn Law Circular; a well-written weekly, The League; and an incessant flow of pamphlets. At the height of the effort in the early 1840s, Cobden estimated that more than one-third of the nation’s eight hundred thousand voters regularly received The League.79
The forces of repeal enlisted not only the new power of the rails and the penny post, but also a very old one: God’s messengers on earth. The free-traders drew on the religious fervor of their Chartist and abolitionist allies. At one League meeting, seven hundred ministers in Manchester declared the corn laws “opposed to the law of God,” perhaps the first and last time that the Almighty was so dramatically invoked on the side of tariff reduction.80
The League also deployed platoons of lawyers into the counties and boroughs to poll voters and ascertain their political leanings. Any landowner whose registration or qualification was questionable saw his franchise challenged, and in order to prevent the opposition from doing the same, the papers of likely free-traders were set right. This strategy quite often resulted in the disqualification of up to one in six Tory electors in a given district. Finally, the League was able to harness its mighty financial resources to purchase property blocks in the names of poor tenants so that each received forty shillings a year in rent—just enough to qualify for the franchise.81
When they were not busy in Westminster, Cobden and his colleague John Bright canvassed the country, the former leading off with his charm and quiet mastery of the facts, the latter sweeping away the audience with roaring moral indignation at the perfidy of the landowners. The new railroads whisked them from city to city on an almost hourly basis, and they arrived at each new venue fresh and rested, a feat unimaginable in the days of horse and coach.
In 1841 the Whig government of Lord Melbourne fell and precipitated a general election. Cobden had been narrowly defeated in a run for the Commons four years previously, but he was now such a well-known personality that he easily won election, along with a number of other League candidates, including John Bright.
The election also saw the Tories regain power and returned Robert Peel to 10 Downing Street, the residence he had lost in 1835. Peel’s political vision and dogged empiricism put him far out in front of, and out of touch with, the reactionary and aristocratic landowning Tory rank and file. Over the next several years, Cobden sparred with him over the Corn Law, and while their exchanges occasionally became acrimonious, Cobden’s command of the facts and his pleasing and logical demeanor slowly wore down the prime minister’s opposition to repeal.
The essence of Cobden’s argument was as follows. Allowing in cheap foreign corn helped the workingman in two ways: first, it provided him with easy bread; and second, this bread would be paid for by English manufactures, whose production gave the laborer work. In short, trade inward of necessity produced trade outward.82 During one of Cobden’s speeches in the Commons, Peel turned to his deputy Sidney Herbert and said, “You must answer this, for I cannot.”83
Both sides sought to exploit the dismal labor conditions of the time. In particular, the Tories could thunder with righteous indignation (and not a little hypocrisy) at the dark satanic mills, owned, more often than not, by League members. No sooner had Cobden taken his seat in 1841 than he was attacked as a heartless mill owner and investigated for bookkeeping irregularities. Cobden’s factories were, for the era, generally well run and humane, and he easily avoided indictment. In 1844, Lord Ashley Cooper, a Tory MP whose family owned huge agricultural estates, introduced a measure that would have radically restricted factory working hours and child labor. The bill was subsequently watered down and passed with Peel’s intervention, and in 1845 Cooper took off after calico printers, a move obviously aimed squarely at Cobden. When Cooper pointed out that child factory workers labored long hours for a pittance of three shillings per week, Cobden retorted that at least they were working indoors, and that child farm laborers put in longer hours in all weather for half the salary.84
Victory in the battle for repeal came in fits and starts. In 1842, poor harvests drove Peel to persuade his cabinet to halve the 1828 sliding scale of import duties on grain, and in 1843 Parliament reduced the tariff on Canadian wheat to just one shilling per quarter.85 In doing so, the prime minister pleased no one—certainly not Cobden, Bright, and their colleagues in the League, who scorned the halfhearted measure, and certainly not many of his fellow Tories, disgusted with Peel’s perceived betrayal of his class. Two years later, however, bountiful harvests took the pressure off the landowners, and the League made little progress in Parliament.
Then, in 1845, the gods of agriculture let loose their fury on the British Isles, and precipitated one of the most dramatic episodes in English political history. July and August of that year saw a wet, cold “green winter” that savaged the wheat harvest. Almost simultaneously, a potato blight appeared in southern England and spread like wildfire to Ireland, throwing the populace well beyond the brink of starvation. As the nightmarish year wore on, Peel’s government watched in horror. A relief commission was empowered to purchase American corn (maize), and a special scientific commission reported that the blight was even more disastrous than had been feared. On November 22, the other shoe dropped when the leader of the Whig opposition, Lord John Russell, declared for repeal.
By that point, even the staunchest Tories understood that in order to avoid mass starvation, English and Irish ports would have to be opened to foreign grain. Peel further realized that once open, they could not be shut without risking revolution; two weeks later, he assembled his cabinet and informed them that he intended to move for repeal.86 When two of his ministers refused their support, he tendered his resignation to the queen. Russell proved unable to put together a Whig government, because the party had only a minority in the Commons, and Peel resumed office on December 20.
By January 1846 Peel had no choice but to admit publicly that Cobden and the League had long since proved their case, and that he himself had changed his mind about the Corn Law. Those of his fellow Tories who remained unconverted would ha
ve to be outmaneuvered.87 This remarkable act of self-sacrifice sealed both his political fate as well as his reputation as arguably Britain’s ablest nineteenth-century leader. On June 25, repeal passed the House of Lords, and within days the Tory party’s landowning elite, spearheaded by Benjamin Disraeli, forced Peel’s final resignation.88, 89 Peel had saved his own class, the landowning aristocracy, from itself, and in the process became anathema to it.
Although the repeal in 1846 marks a historical watershed in world trade policy, by that date most of the heavy lifting had already been done. The act of 1842 had lowered tariffs even more than the final repeal, and modern scholarship suggests that by 1846 effective grain duties had been falling for decades; by the time of their final repeal, they had long since become economically unimportant.90
Cobden continued on in Parliament. In order to spread the free-trade gospel, he increasingly lived abroad. Late in life, he found a willing student in Emperor Napoleon III of France, the first Napoleon’s nephew.
By 1859, Anglo-French relations had deteriorated nearly to the point of war, mainly because of hysteria stemming from Britain’s distrust of its historic enemy, and Cobden found himself on an unofficial mission to Paris advocating for an English-French tariff-reduction treaty. He met with Napoleon III and the emperor’s ministers on several occasions. The emperor remarked that while he would very much like to repeal his nation’s import tariffs, “The difficulties are very great. We do not make reforms in France; we only make revolutions.”91 Napoleon III was more than receptive to Cobden’s idealistic advice, but the captains of French industry and their allies in the government wanted no part of free trade. By now Cobden was a maestro in the art of dispatching protectionist assertions. A passage in his diary speaks as well to the modern world as it did to Napoleon III:
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