Page:Dictionary of National Biography volume 58.djvu/328

Villiers by Villiers, determined to wait no longer before taking the sense of the House of Commons upon the continuance of the corn law. William Clay (afterwards Sir W. Clay, bart.), who represented the Tower Hamlets, was entrusted with the duty of bringing the question before the house, and on 16 March 1837 he presented several petitions against the corn law, and moved the adoption of a fixed duty of 10s. a quarter on the importation of foreign wheat. Villiers seconded the motion in a speech in which he contended that, while England's prosperity was due to the excess of production over consumption, the tendency of the corn law was to limit production. The motion was defeated by 223 to 89. Villiers's speech is interesting from the point of time at which it was delivered. The Anti-Cornlaw League had not then been founded. Four years had to pass before Cobden entered parliament, and it was more than six years before Bright became member for Durham, while Gladstone was actually among those who voted against the motion, and for many years continued to oppose the repeal of the corn law.

In the autumn of 1837 a general election took place. At Wolverhampton there was a fair stand-up fight between the free-traders and the protectionists. Villiers pledged himself on the hustings, if elected, to move in the House of Commons for a total repeal of the corn law. The polling was decisive. Villiers and Thornely polled over a thousand votes, beating the conservative by more than four hundred.

On 15 March 1838 Villiers moved the first of his annual motions: ‘That the house resolve itself into a committee of the whole house for the purpose of taking into consideration the act 9 George IV, c. 60, relating to the importation of corn.’ He declared that if the house would resolve itself into a committee he would move for the repeal of the duties on corn. He traced the depressed state of most of our manufactures to the loss of foreign markets in consequence of the neglect of our commercial interests by the ministers, who preferred to maintain the corn law. He urged that commercial liberty was as essential to the wellbeing of the country as civil and religious liberty. The motion was defeated by 300 to 95 votes.

In July 1838 Lord Fitzwilliam presented a petition from Glasgow praying for the repeal of the corn law. In the debate that ensued Lord Melbourne declared that the government would not take a decided part in the question (which he admitted to be ‘an open one’) till it was certain that the majority of the people favoured the idea of a change. The free-traders accepted this statement as a challenge to the people to commence agitation, by which, they were reminded, they had alone obtained catholic emancipation and parliamentary reform. Before the close of the year the association (afterwards converted into the Anti-Cornlaw League) was founded at Manchester, and had commenced to raise funds. So successful was the movement that a public dinner, at which eight hundred gentlemen were present, was given by the association on 22 Jan. 1839 to Villiers and the members who had supported his motion in the previous year. He was then hailed as the parliamentary leader of the contest; and on 19 Feb. 1839 he moved in the House of Commons that certain gentlemen should be heard at the bar of the house in support of their petition against the corn law. Villiers confined himself to setting forth the grave depression of home and foreign trade, and urged the necessity of an inquiry into the allegations of the delegates of the association as to the injurious operations of the corn law. The motion was defeated by 361 to 172 votes, but, according to a competent observer of that day (, Life and Times of Sir Robert Peel, iii. 82), Villiers's speech was not lost; the protectionist landlords began to believe in the possibility of their monopoly being endangered. They had previously regarded Villiers's motions much in the same light as Grote's annual motion on the ballot—a matter that was to give rise to a long debate, and to be defeated by a large majority, and then to be laid aside for the rest of the session. But Villiers was so earnest and advanced such an array of facts, and so clearly traced the direct and incidental injury produced by the corn law to the manufacturers, the traders, and the working classes, that the landlords became seriously alarmed. Referring to Villiers's speech, Miss Martineau says (History of the Thirty Years' Peace, vol. ii. ch. xiv. p. 405): ‘Villiers's speech was a statement of singular force and clearness. On that night he assumed his post undisputed as the head authority in the legislature on the subject of the corn law.’ Cobden, who was present as ‘a stranger’ in the House of Commons, was so impressed by the opposition offered by the monopolists that he determined that he would thenceforth commence to agitate, and never cease until the public should be apprised of the character of the corn law and the difficulty of repealing it. On 12 March 1839 Villiers moved his second annual motion for the repeal of the corn law, pointing out that the many applications