Page:History of merchant shipping and ancient commerce (Volume 3).djvu/108

 *culturists to submit to some sacrifice on their part, proposing a sliding-scale of duties on corn until February 1849, with the condition, however, that wheat and other cereal produce should, after that date, be imported from foreign countries at a duty of 1s. a quarter.

It is not the province of this work to describe the struggles of parties during this momentous period, and it is therefore sufficient to state that the measures of Sir Robert Peel, supported as they were out of doors by the vigorous action of the Anti-Corn-Law League, and in Parliament by the Liberal party, were carried by large majorities through the Commons and were, ultimately, passed by the Lords. But, meantime the Irish Arms Bill had furnished the Opposition with a temporary accession of members to defeat that measure, and consequently with the means of overthrowing Sir Robert's Administration, so that the night of his triumph on the great question of the repeal of the Corn Laws was a witness also of his downfall; and, in the records of the debates of that ever-memorable evening, may be read the words now so familiar to our ears:—"It may be," he remarked, in his concluding speech, "that I shall be sometimes remembered with good-*will in those places which are the abodes of men whose lot it is to labour and earn their daily bread by the sweat of their brow; in such places, perhaps, my name may be remembered with expressions of good-will, when those who inhabit them recruit their exhausted strength with abundant and untaxed food, the sweeter because no longer leavened with the spirit of injustice."