will be enabled to deal on more liberal terms with the tailor; the tailor so favored by legislation will be able in his turn to order a better kind of beer from the publican and pay a higher price for it.  Thus, by some extraordinary process, everybody pays too much for everything, and nevertheless all are enriched in turn.  The absurdity of this is easily kept out of sight where the protective duties affect a number of varying and complicated interests, manufacturing, commercial, and productive.

In the United States, for example, where the manufacturers are benefited in one place and the producers are benefited in another, and where the country always produces food abundant to supply its own wants, men are not brought so directly face to face with the fallacy of the principle as they were in England at the time of the Anti-Corn Law League.  In America “protection” affects manufacturers for the most part, and there is no such popular craving for cheap manufactures as to bring the protective principle into collision with the daily wants of the people.  But in England, during the reign of the Corn Law, the food which the people put into their mouths was the article mainly taxed, and made cruelly costly by the working of protection.

Nevertheless, the country put up with this system down to the close of the year 1836.  At that time there was a stagnation of trade and a general depression of business.  Severe poverty prevailed in many districts.  Inevitably, therefore, the question arose in the minds of most men, in distressed or depressed places, whether it could be a good thing for the country in general to have the price of bread kept high by factitious means when wages had sunk and work become scarce.  An Anti-Corn-Law association was formed in London, It began pretentiously enough, but it brought about no result.  London is not a place where popular agitation finds a fitting centre.  In 1838, however, Bolton, in Lancashire, suffered from a serious commercial crisis.  Three-fifths of its manufacturing activity became paralyzed at once.  Many houses of business were actually closed and abandoned, and thousands of workmen were left without the means of life.  Lancashire suddenly roused itself into the resolve to agitate against the corn laws, and Manchester became the headquarters of the movement which afterward accomplished so much.

The Anti-Corn-Law League was formed, and a Free-Trade Hall was built in Manchester on the scene of that disturbance which was called the “massacre of Peterloo.”  The leaders of the Anti-Corn-Law movement were Richard Cobden, John Bright, and Charles Villiers.  Cobden was not a Manchester man.  He was the son of a Sussex farmer.  After the death of his father he was taken by his uncle and employed in his wholesale warehouse in the city of London.  He afterward became a partner in a Manchester cotton-factory, and sometimes travelled on the commercial business of the establishment.  He became what would then