The Corn Laws and High Farming

Abstract

In polemical terms the repeal of the Corn Laws was by far the most important element in that legislative package which Sir Robert Peel presented to the House of Commons on the evening of 27 January I 846. But if the other elements in the package are ignored -in effect, if polemical importance is allowed to become the sole measure of significance the meaning of repeal to the men who drafted the Corn Importation Bill tends to be distorted. It becomes confused with the meaning of repeal to those other men who did so much to project the Corn Laws to the forefront of British politics. Almost inevitably, such a procedure obscures the variety of factors which made it essential that a solution to the corn law question be found. Almost inevitably, it also obscures the fundamental distinction between those factors on the one hand which made a solution essential and those on the other which, by making a solution possible, defined its nature. In large part the need to do something about the Corn Laws derived from their growing polemical importance. In the context of such new types of social movement as Chartism, which focused attention on class unity and the lines of division between classes, the Corn Laws served to reinforce the status of the existing elites of both town and countryside by re-emphasizing the notion that the prosperity of the various classes which composed the same interest group was primarily affected not by one another but by a rival interest group. However, the Corn Laws only served to strengthen the traditional units of British society up to that point at which the dangers inherent in interest group rivalry did not exceed the benefits inherent in interest group cohesion. By i846 many men believed such a point had been reached. As a rule, however, they accepted the arguments at face value which had served so well to enhance the cohesion of the urban and rural interest groups. In consequence they helped to create the impression that the nature of corn law repeal is to be explained in terms of the major reason it became essential that the corn laws were repealed not only to prevent interest group rivalry from degenerating into violence but also to register the victory of the urban interest group over the rural.1 In effect, they assumed that the Corn Laws were really that boon to the landed interest which interest group polemics required them to be. By the 'forties, however, the economic value of the Corn Laws to the landed interest was no longer so clear. The Corn Laws were predicated on the notion that rural prosperity could only be had on the basis of high arable prices. It was this which lay behind the Act