Page:Notes on the Anti-Corn Law Struggle.djvu/171

 Lord Palmerston, who, without a shadow of pretension to ancestors whose names appeared either in the Domesday Survey or among the barons of Magna Carta, looked down upon the "men of cotton and cant" with a scorn as lofty as if they had been able to prove an uninterrupted lineal descent from a genuine pirate. Perhaps they might have had means of proving such a descent, for those who had seen slave ships used to say that Lord. Palmerston seemed to them to have much the appearance of the captain of a slaver. They laughed at the Anti-Corn Law League and treated its efforts to influence the mind of the public as the tricks of mountebanks. Lord Granville, in his speech at Wolverhampton, on the occasion of unveiling the statue of the Right Hon. C. P. Villiers, on June 6, 1879, said:—

"'An offer to him to become Governor of Bombay was withdrawn, in consequence of objections raised by the East India Company, exclusively owing to the political antecedents of Mr. Villiers, and the low company he had kept in his communications with the Anti-Corn Law League.'"

It is evident from this that Mr. Villiers derived nothing but loss in the world at large from his exertions in the cause of Corn Law Repeal. Those who have had, like Mr. Disraeli, as he expressed it