Corn Laws

The "Corn Laws" were introduced initially as a means of protecting profits by taxing importing corn. The statement below is directly cut and pasted from Wikipedia regarding this Regency era tax law:

Origins

In 1813, a House of Commons Committee recommended excluding foreign-grown corn until domestically grown corn reached £4 (£2,520:2007) per quarter (a quarter is a unit of eight bushels). The political economist Thomas Malthus believed this to be a fair price, and that it would be dangerous for Britain to rely on imported corn as lower prices would reduce labourers' wages, and manufacturers would lose out due to the fall in purchasing power of landlords and farmers.[3] However David Ricardo believed in free trade so Britain could use its capital and population to her comparative advantage.[3] With the advent of peace in 1814, corn prices dropped, and the Tory government of Lord Liverpool passed the 1815 Corn Law. This led to serious rioting in London[4] and - alongside the issue of suffrage - the Peterloo Massacre in Manchester.

This foreshadowed a growing tide of radicalism which was repressed by such measures as the Six Acts.
[edit] Opposition

In 1820 the Merchants' Petition, written by Thomas Tooke, was presented to the Commons demanding free trade and an end to protective tariffs. Lord Liverpool claimed to be in favour of free trade but argued that complicated restrictions made it difficult to repeal protectionist laws. He added, though, that he believed Britain's economic dominance grew in spite of, not because of, the protectionist system.[5] In 1821 the President of the Board of Trade, William Huskisson, drew up a Commons Committee report which called for a return to the "practically free" trade of the pre-1815 years.[6] The Importation Act 1822 decreed that corn could be imported when domestically harvested corn reached 80 shillings but imported corn was prohibited when the price fell to 70 shillings per quarter. After the passing of this Act until 1828 the corn price never rose to 80 shillings. In 1827 the landlords rejected Huskisson's proposals for a sliding scale and in the next year Huskisson and the new Prime Minister, the Duke of Wellington, devised a new sliding scale for the Importation of Corn Act 1828 whereby when domestic corn was 52 shillings per quarter or less, the duty would be 34 shillings, 8 pence and when the price rose to 73 shillings the duty declined to 1 shilling.[7]
Robert Peel became Conservative Prime Minister in 1841 and his government succeeded in repealing the tariffs.

The Whig governments in power for most of the years 1830–41 decided not to repeal the Corn Laws. In 1841 Sir Robert Peel became Conservative Prime Minister and Richard Cobden, a leading free trader, was elected for the first time. Peel had studied the works of Adam Smith, David Hume and Ricardo and proclaimed in 1839: "I have read all that has been written by the gravest authorities on political economy on the subject of rent, wages, taxes, tithes".[8] In 1842 he modified the sliding scale by reducing the top duty to 20 shillings when the price fell to 51 shillings or less.[7]

The landlords claimed that manufacturers like Cobden wanted cheap food so they could drive down wages and thus maximise their profits, a view shared by the socialist Chartist movement. Karl Marx[9] said: "The campaign for the abolition of the Corn Laws had begun and the workers' help was needed. The advocates of repeal therefore promised, not only a Big Loaf (which was to be doubled in size) but also the passing of the Ten Hours Bille" (i.e. to reduce working hours).

The Anti-Corn Law League, founded in 1838, was peacefully agitating for repeal. They funded writers like William Cooke Taylor to travel the manufacturing regions of northern England to research their cause.[10] Cook Taylor published a number of books as an Anti-Corn Law propagandist, most notably, The Natural History of Society (1841), Notes of a tour in the manufacturing districts of Lancashire (1842) and Factories and the Factory System (1844). Cobden and the rest of the Anti-Corn Law League believed in the view that cheap food meant higher wages and Cobden praised a speech by a working man who said:

When provisions are high, the people have so much to pay for them that they have little or nothing left to buy clothes with; and when they have little to buy clothes with, there are few clothes sold; and when there are few clothes sold, there are too many to sell, they are very cheap; and when they are very cheap, there cannot be much paid for making them: and that, consequently, the manufacturing working man's wages are reduced, the mills are shut up, business is ruined, and general distress is spread through the country. But when, as now, the working man has the said 25s. left in his pocket, he buys more clothing with it (ay, and other articles of comfort too), and that increases the demand for them, and the greater the demand...makes them rise in price, and the rising price enables the working man to get higher wages and the masters better profits. This, therefore, is the way I prove that high provisions make lower wages, and cheap provisions make higher wages.[11]

The Economist was founded in September 1843 by James Wilson with help from the Anti-Corn Law League; his son-in-law Walter Bagehot later became the editor of this newspaper.