Source.—Hansard, Third Series, vol. lxxxiii., col. 276, June 27, 1846.
Sir R. Peel: ... I fairly avow to you that in making this great reduction upon the import of articles, the produce and manufacture of foreign countries, I have no guarantee to give you that other countries will immediately follow our example. I give you that advantage in the argument. Wearied with our long and unavailing efforts to enter into satisfactory commercial treaties with other nations, we have resolved at length to consult our own interests, and not to punish those other countries for the wrong they do us in continuing their high duties upon the importation of our products and manufactures, by continuing high duties ourselves, encouraging unlawful trade. We have had no communication with any Foreign Government upon the subject of these reductions. We cannot promise that France will immediately make a corresponding reduction in her tariff. I cannot promise that Russia will prove her gratitude to us for our reduction of duty upon her tallow, by any diminution of her duties. You may, therefore, say, in opposition to the present plan, What is this superfluous liberality, that you are going to do away with all these duties, and yet you expect nothing in return? I may, perhaps, be told that many foreign countries, since the former relaxation of duties on our part—and that would be perfectly consistent with the fact—foreign countries which have benefited by our relaxations, have not followed our example; nay, have not only not followed our example, but have actually applied to the importation of British goods higher rates of duties than formerly. I quite admit it. I give you all the benefit of that argument. I rely upon that fact, as conclusive proof of the policy we are pursuing. It is a fact, that other countries have not followed our example, and have levied higher duties in some cases upon our goods. But what has been the result upon the amount of your exports? You have defied the regulations of these countries. Your export trade is greatly increased. Now why is that so? Partly because of your acting without wishing to avail yourselves of their assistance; partly because of the smuggler, not engaged by you, in so many continental countries, whom the strict regulations and the triple duties, which are to prevent any ingress of foreign goods, have raised up; and partly, perhaps, because these very precautions against the ingress of your commodities are a burden, and the taxation increasing the cost of production disqualify the foreigner from competing with you. But your exports, whatever be the tariffs of other countries, or however apparent the ingratitude with which they have treated you—your export trade has been constantly increasing. By the remission of your duties upon raw materials—by inciting your skill and industry—by competition with foreign goods, you have defied your competitors in foreign markets, and you have even been enabled to exclude them. Notwithstanding their hostile tariffs, the declared value of British exports has increased above £10,000,000 during the period which has elapsed since the relaxation of the duties on your part. I say, therefore, to you that these hostile tariffs, so far from being an objection to continuing your policy, are an argument in its favour. But, depend upon it, your example will ultimately prevail.... I do hope that the friends and lovers of peace between nations will derive material strength from the example which I have advised, by remitting the impediments to commercial intercourse. But observe, if that be the effect, I think in all probability that the continuance of permanent peace will expose us to more extensive and more formidable competition with foreign countries with respect to manufactures. During war we commanded the supply of nations. Peace has introduced not only new consumers, but also formidable manufacturing interests. In order that we may retain our pre-eminence it is of the greatest importance that we neglect no opportunity of securing to ourselves those advantages by which that pre-eminence can be alone secured. Sir, I firmly believe that abundance and cheapness of provisions is one of the constituents by which the continuance of manufacturing and commercial pre-eminence may be maintained. You may say the object of these observations is to flatter the love of gain, and administer merely to the desire of accumulating money. I advise this measure on no such ground. I believe that the accumulation of wealth, that is, the increase of capital, is a main element, or at least one of the chief means by which we can retain the eminence we have so long possessed. But I have attempted to show that abundance of provisions, and security (which is the main thing) for continued abundance, not only contributes to the accumulation of wealth, but that it is directly conducive to the alleviation of public burdens, by increasing the revenue; to the alleviation of local burdens, by diminishing crimes; but, above all, that it is conducive to the spread of morality, by diminishing those temptations to crime which arise from distress and poverty.... I cannot appeal to any ungenerous feeling—I cannot appeal to fear, or to anything which will be calculated to exercise an undue sway over the reason of those to whom these proposals are made. There may be agitation, but it is not one which has reached the great mass of the labouring classes, there being among them a total absence of all excitement. But this I do say—there has been a great change in the opinions of the great mass of the community with respect to the Corn Laws. There is between the master manufacturers and the operative classes a common conviction that did not prevail at 1842 or at a former period—that it will be for the public advantage that these laws should be repealed; and while there is that union of sentiment between them, there appears at the same time to be a general contentment and loyalty, and a confidence in your justice and impartiality.
Sir Howard Douglas (member for Liverpool): ... This establishes, I think, the truth of what I had the honour of saying in this House on a former occasion: that there is a great difference between that plenty and low price which are produced by abundance of home production, and that which is produced by unlimited foreign importation; that the one quickens, the other deadens the home market; that England is England’s best customer; and that the contemporaneous exportation from England in return for foreign corn would be chiefly in British gold. Perfect free trade consists in the absence of restrictions on both sides.... We cannot combat rival tariffs, directly or indirectly, without subjecting British industry to severe depressions in relation to foreign industry and foreign labour.... To lay suitable duties upon the production of the foreigner, who lays burthens upon yours, does not give the monopoly of the home market to the home producer, nor turn towards any particular employment more capital and labour than would naturally go there. It only hinders that amount of those actually engaged from being turned away into a less natural direction. There cannot be two prices for the same article in the same market. The foreign consumer will not pay more for a British than for a domestic article of equal quality. The exporter cannot pay the rival duty, for, if so, he would sell at a loss or be undersold by the foreign rival: and therefore to compete with foreign protected markets British articles must be produced so much cheaper as to enter into this competition. The cost of production must therefore be reduced. This is most immediately and readily done by reducing the wages of labour, and it is most important to remark that it is precisely in times of pressure, when profits are most bare and labour most in want of employment, that this takes place and that mechanical labour is most extended. This not only displaces manual labour in times of pressure, but by so much precludes it from participating in future prosperity. It is difficult to trace the various uses of the money produced by the bills drawn on Great Britain by the exporters of foreign productions, for which they will not take British produce in return.... Whatever be the end of the circuitous transactions, the money payments made by us must first afford profitable investments to the rival interests of foreign nations and employment of foreign labour.... The noble lord, the member for the West Riding, observed forcibly, the increase of population requires additional means and sources of subsistence. But can we not find, do we not possess in our Colonies unbounded sources, rich fields of virgin fertility, from which we may derive unlimited supplies of British food? ... I have imagined that it might really be possible to treat the Colonies like counties of the country, not only in direct trade with the United Kingdom, but in commercial intercourse with each other, by free trade among ourselves, under a reasonable, moderate degree of protection from without, and so resolve the United Kingdom and all her Colonies and possessions into a commercial union such as might defy all rivalry and defeat all combinations. But free trade—the extinction of the protective principle, the repeal of the differential duties—would at once convert all our Colonies, in a commercial sense, into as many independent states. I defy any hon. member opposite to say that this would not be a virtual dissolution of the Colonial system. The British flag might still fly for a time, where sound British policy had raised it, in every part of the world. The colonists would regard it still with the veneration to which it is entitled. Our navies might still guard their coasts and waters and our troops hold military possession of their lands; but then would come the question of the economists, in debates on the Navy, Army, and Ordnance Estimates, What is the use of colonies? They consume not, as of old, the productions of the United Kingdom in any greater degree than if they were foreign States; we no longer consider and treat the colonies as domestic sources essential for the supply of the materials of our manufacturing industry and the elements of our maritime power; and it will be difficult to answer that economical argument, when, moreover, we shall have discarded our Colonies, for considerations of a wretched pecuniary economy, and sacrificed national objects and high destinies to the minor, and the comparatively mean, calculations of speculative wealth.
Mr. Poulett Scrope: ... Sir, the plea of the weight of national taxation for a Corn Law appears to me not only a false, but a dishonest one. By no possible contrivance or juggle of protection can you fix the debt on the foreigner; it must still be paid by British subjects of some kind; and if you relieve yourselves from your share of it by any trickery of this kind, you can only do it by shifting the burden upon the rest of the community. You have chosen to place it on the most helpless of all the masses—the eaters of bread—who by your law must buy at your shop, at your artificial prices, and so pay the debt for you or starve. Is this right or is it wrong? No, sir, I repeat: if the Corn Laws do not raise the price of corn, they at least diminish its supply to a half-fed people. If they do, they can only benefit one class at the expense of every other. I take the speech of the hon. member for Northamptonshire, who may be considered to represent the pure protectionists. I appeal to the recollection of the House, if the main point of that speech was not an attack on what the hon. member called a stern dogma of a cold and hard political economy—viz., “that we should buy as cheap and sell as dear as we can”—a maxim which I would venture to call, not a dogma of political economy, but the very first principle of all commerce, the ABC of trade. But perhaps the hon. member despises trade and its shopkeeping maxims. But I am much mistaken if his friends and clients, the tenant farmers, act on any other than this vulgar and cruel mercantile principle themselves. They would not like to be compelled to act on the opposite principle of buying dear and selling cheap. No; what they really mean, and the hon. member too, in railing against the principle of buying cheap and selling dear is that the manufacturers should sell cheap to them, the farmers, while they sell dear to the manufacturers; and this is, in fact, the object aimed at by the Corn Laws. But the hon. member illustrated the cruelty of this flagitious dogma of a cold political economy by pathetic pictures, which were not without their effect on the feelings of the House. The first was that of a crowd of paper-stainers and silk-weavers thrown out of employment by the unpatriotic and anti-national preference of French silks and paper-hangings to those of British manufacture. Every picture has its reverse, and to the hon. member’s picture of an ideal scene resulting from the operation of our mercantile principle, I will oppose a picture of the result of his protective principle, not drawn from the imagination, but one of the real scenes which did occur, in hundreds of instances, but a few years ago, in Paisley, in Stockport, in Manchester, and other places. Let the hon. member imagine a manufacturer at that time, his warehouses choked with goods which he could not dispose of; imagine that, after putting his workpeople first on low wages, next on half-work, he finally finds himself obliged to discharge them altogether, and to shut up his mill. They crowd in hundreds round him—a melancholy spectacle—men, women, and children imploring him for work and food. What is his answer? “All my capital lies locked up in yonder warehouses, and I have exhausted my credit likewise. The foreigner can buy no more of the goods you make because our laws prohibit his paying for them in the only thing he has to sell—his corn, the very food you want....” The hon. member does not seem to be aware of the fact that to buy anything from the foreigner we must sell to him something of equal value—that for every quarter of foreign corn or every piece of foreign silk imported we must expect to pay for it an equal value of goods the produce of our own manufacturers, and that British or native industry is as much employed in the one case as in the other, the only difference being (and a great difference it is) that by the free exchange we get more of what we want, or of a better quality, in return for our industry, than if we attempted to produce it at home. And this is just the benefit which commerce confers. The hon. member does not seem to be aware that the principle he declaims against as a cold dogma of a stern political economy is the one sole vivifying principle of all commerce, the stimulus to all improvement, the mainspring of civilisation—the principle, namely, of obtaining the largest and best result at the least cost; in other words, to get the most you can of what you want for your money or your labour. But I can hardly wonder at the opinions held by the hon. member, when I see him sitting on the same bench with the hon. member for Knaresborough, who abhors machinery as the root of all evil. It is a fitting alliance; in fact, it is the same fallacy in a different form. The notion that it is better to buy dear than to buy cheap is the same as that it is better to spend much labour than little to produce the same result. The idea is that the more of labour and capital anything costs to obtain it the better. So stated, it seems incredible that any man should entertain the idea. And yet this is the notion which lies at the bottom of all the declamations against machinery for economising labour and against the mercantile principle of economising capital. In both cases an increase of produce is obtained at a less cost, the very circumstance which alone raised the condition of civilised man above that of the savage.
