Men and Principles - Part One

Introduction

"Tory men and Whig measures," was the young Benjamin Disraeli's biting description of the government led by Sir Robert Peel. The future PM's criticism and eventual open revolt against his own party had been spurred by Peel's decision to repeal the Corn Laws. Enacted in 1815 - though similar legislation had existed since the seventeenth century - the laws established a high fixed tariff wall, later reformed into a sliding scale, on the importation of grain into Britain. Rather than simply being a piece of mercantilist legislation, the acts rested on the greatest political and social fault line of late Hanoverian and early Victorian Britain.

The public and parliamentary campaigns waged over its repeal did much to define the political and economic life of Britain for nearly a century. Their immediate impact however was almost as radical - the greatest power on earth adopted as the core of its international commercial policy the principle of free trade. Modern international treaties such as GATT, the WTO and the early Common Market, are only pale shadows of the free trade practiced by Britain in the aftermath of the collapse of the Corn Laws regime, being examples of "managed" international trade. Stretching over two decades the drama that unfolded would see the near destruction of the Conservative Party at the hands of the man who founded it, the end of one of the most sterling political careers in British history, the rise of two new stars who would dominated British politics for another four decades, the emergence of mass participatory politics and a period of unprecedented economic growth and stability.

It Usually Begins With Adam Smith

In his biography of William Pitt the Younger, the 5th Earl of Roseberry, himself briefly a Liberal PM, recounts the legend of Adam Smith attending a dinner party hosted by Pitt while the later was in office. Absent minded as always Smith arrived late. Before he could make his apologies the Prime Minister rose and said simply "our teacher." Smith's impact on educated opinion in the decades after the publication of the Wealth of Nations in 1776 can hardly be overestimated. While it would take almost exactly seventy years until Smith's central recommendation in Book Four, the policy of free trade, was enacted, his victory over the intellectual proponents of mercantilism was far swifter. By the time David Ricardo, the wealthy self-made stockbroker descendant of Sephardic Jews, wrote his 1817 classic On The Principles of Political Economy and Taxation, Smith's ideas were almost completely ascendant in intellectual and public policy circles. In his book, and subsequent speeches given as an MP, Ricardo laid out the Theory of Comparative Advantage.

More than simply an elaboration of Smith's work the theory was a capstone of classical economic thinking, surpassing Smith's shrewd insights into economic cause and effect with a comprehensive system of international trade. So sophisticated and exhaustive was Ricardo's work that his ideas still lay at the foundation of modern international trade theory. Ricardo, in effect, removed the mercantilist position from intellectual respectability in Britain. It would take almost a century for mercantilism/protectionism to re-enter the political vocabulary as something other than a sign of opprobrium. The theory of free trade having been established on the intellectual high ground, it now faced its hardest challenge, the political and social realities of the day.

The Establishment

The Corn Laws and an unreformed Parliament: These were the two key pillars of gentry and aristocratic control over the British economy and society. For much of the eighteenth century Britain was a net exporter of grain, but by the last years of the century a population boom had forced Britain to become dependent to a small degree on foreign imports. The imports threatened to drive down domestic grain prices, which in turn would strain rental incomes. The Corn Laws were the original textbook example of what economists call "rent seeking" public policy, deliberating manipulating the price of a good or service to artificially increase profits. In a time when the ideas of Smith and Ricardo were on the ascent, not simply among the educated elite but among the increasingly literate and political engaged middle and upper lower classes, the Corn Laws were a political possibility only because of a quirk in the British constitutional and parliamentary structure.

Since the electoral map of England had been drawn up in the Late Middle Ages, the intervening centuries had seen shifts in population, both absolute and proportional. In modern parliamentary democracies a periodic review of demographic shifts often results in reallocation of seats between different regions of a country, no such reallocation was done in Britain on a major scale until 1832. What had emerged in the century or so before the Great Reform Act of 1832 was a patch-work of what were known as rotten boroughs, urban ridings where the population had fallen dramatically since the Middle Ages. The most famous example of this was the riding of Old Sarum.

From the reign of Edward II it had elected two MPs, yet by the seventeenth century there were no resident voters. The once prosperous town had moved several miles over the centuries. The dozen or so registered voters were wealthy landowners who lived elsewhere. While Old Sarum was an extreme example it showcased the excesses of a system where dozens of seats in the Commons were controlled by small cliques or even individual landowners, many of them peers. At the same time new industrial cities like Birmingham and Manchester were under-represented compared to their share of the national population.

While the idea of free trade quickly convinced large sections of the post-Waterloo political leadership of its benefits - converts to the cause included the Prime Minister Lord Liverpool (1812-1827) and William Huskisson, the President of the Board of Trade - much of the parliamentary rank and file, rural MPs whose political support, and often incomes, benefited from the Corn Laws resisted repeal. In quick time blatant economic self-interest was married to paternalistic social attitudes. The end of the Corn Laws, and the projected collapse of rental incomes, would spell the end of the traditional rural way of life. Britain's landed elite, trained from birth to rule both locally and nationally, would have the economic basis of their power and lifestyle undercut.

Who would govern Britain then? The ill-educated and money driven middle classes, unable to see past their account books? The mob of illiterate peasants whose numbers continued to swell the nation's overcrowded and poorly maintained cities? For all the flaws of the gentry and their aristocratic cousins, the argument went, they alone possessed the education, the temperament and the disinterest to govern Britain in the national interest, rather than those of the lower classes who would govern only for their particular interests. The argument was obviously in part hypocritical and self-interested, yet not all its advocates were insincere.

Most of these rural upper class land owners were members of the Tory party and the party became almost synonymous with the Corn Laws. Yet within the Tories a division was opening up between its leadership and its political base. The long-time Tory PM, Lord Liverpool, had become convinced of the need for free trade by the time of his appointment to office in 1812. So strong, however, was support for protection among the party's base that Liverpool was forced to introduce the Corn Laws in 1815 as a supposedly temporary measure. Through out the 1820s and 1830s the Laws were repeatedly tinkered with by free trade leaning ministers, who first replaced the high and fixed tariff on imported grains with a tariff scale that fell as the price of grain rose, and then sought to reduce the scale over all to limit its impact on the market. The conflict between the Tory rank and file, and its increasingly liberal minded elite, would come to a head in the 1840s under the leadership of Britain's greatest soldier and one of her most brilliant statesmen.

The Duke and the Technocrat

In the eight years he had waged war on the continent Wellington had been careful to be non-partisan. Whig or Tory, he refused to alienate anyone who might help keep his expeditionary army, and its continental allies, fed and paid. The years after 1815 saw the Hero of the Peninsula slowly move toward support of, and eventually membership in Lord Liverpool's Tory cabinet. The immediate post-war era was highly unstable, marked with widespread rioting, Luddite attacks on factories and even a spectacular conspiracy to assassinated the entire cabinet. At heart a law and order Tory the Duke dropped his nominal political neutrality and entered cabinet in 1819. In 1822 he was joined by Sir Robert Peel as Home Secretary - effectively the minister in charge of internal security. Despite the near twenty year age difference between the men they became quick and firm political allies. Peel, the son of one of Lancashire's earliest industrialists, had attended Harrow and Christ Church, Oxford, taking a double first in Mathematics and Classics.

His maiden speech in the Commons had caused a sensation and he was soon being compared to his great idol, William Pitt the Younger. Just twenty-four he was appointed Chief Secretary for Ireland, effectively running the Irish government for the next six years. A brilliant administrator and ruthlessly logical thinker and orator, he peppered his speeches with statistics and economic analysis drawn from Smith and Ricardo. As Home Secretary he consolidated Britain's unwieldy and ancient criminal statues, abolished the death penalty for scores of petty crimes and established the world's first modern police force. Never an energetic or charismatic speaker, Peel overwhelmed his opponents with clear, tight and logical argument that seemed to flow with seemingly scientific rigor. Wellington, impressed with the younger man's abilities and sincerity, made him a close ally almost from the start. The men also shared similar convictions on the three great issues of the day, Catholic Emancipation, Parliamentary Reform and the Corn Laws.

Both held a paternalistic view of society as requiring leaders to guide the often petty, selfish and overly emotional middle and lower classes. To both men democracy was an epithet and would have agreed with Thomas Carlyle's famous quip that democracy was really "mobocracy." To that end they were Tories and viewed the landed gentry, the aristocracy, the monarch and the Church of England as pillars of authority and justice; as an interlocking series of institutions meant to develop and sustain a just and wise governing class. Neither men, however, was blind to either merit or economic reality. Wellington had been the younger son of an Irish earl, a full member of the Ascendancy, yet had made his way to the pinnacle of British aristocracy through his military exploits. Peel's rise was more spectacular, his grandfather had been little better than a small town merchant, his father was one of the most successful cotton cloth manufacturers of the early industrial revolution.

Through education, wealth and public service Peel had become a senior member of cabinet, the very center of the British establishment. More philosophical than his friend Wellington, Peel sought to bridge the industrial-agrarian divide, seeking an understanding between the new industrial rich with the historic landed gentry and aristocracy. Both, he argued, should work together to govern Britain in the national interest, serving crown and country. Their wealth allowed them the ability to engage in public service at a time when MPs were unpaid and cabinet salaries fairly modest, their education allowed them to take both a historic and national perspective.

The new industrial elite represented the future, the agrarian the past and arguably the soul of Britain, the two could evolve together, gradually and prudently. The Whigs, who strongly supported repeal of the Corn Laws, were traditional the party of commerce and trade and should have been the easy political choice for rising Lancashire magnates like the Peels. The Whig response to the French Revolution, and the nearly twenty-five years of Franco-British warfare that followed, had been one of open admiration and continual attempts at appeasement. Many Whigs, Edmund Burke being the most famous, drifted into the ranks of the Tories as the party of patriotism and national unity. For many, though by no means most, industrialists regarded the Whigs as the party of anarchy, republicanism and treason.

For Sir Robert Peel his Toryism rested on patriotism and paternalism. Wellington, the soldier statesman, could scarcely have agreed more. Both men opposed Catholic Emancipation, the granting of near full civil rights to catholics, as it would undermined the power of the Protestant Ascendancy in Ireland, allowing for a creeping democratic element among a populace by no means reconciled to British rule and traditions. They opposed the sweeping and immediate reform of Parliament, the elimination of rotten borough like Old Sarum, and the one that had returned Sir Robert Peel to his first parliament, and fairer representation to the new industrial cities. Such reform would threaten the governing classes with the specter of democracy, as well as being more likely to return Whig members.

The Corn Laws, however, were more problematic for both men. They both agreed that free trade was an economic ideal, Wellington probably following his younger colleague's lead, yet a free trade in grain could economically undermine the agrarian faction of the Tory Party, destroying the alliance Peel hoped to develop. There was no contradiction in the mind of either men in an alliance between industrial and agrarian elites, their particular interests, as all particular interests, could in the long term be served by serving the national interest. As the 1830s and 1840s wore on that treasured assumption would confront Peel's own growing doubts about the Corn Laws, and the new politics that emerged after 1832.

Continued at The Gods of the Copybook Headings