Page:The work of the Liberal Party during the Last Fifty Years.pdf/2

2 or Employer of any kind can know how any vote is given—and now the poorest man is as safe in giving his vote as the richest. This is a great safeguard for the Voter. The Bill for the re-arrangement of seats now before Parliament is the work of the Liberal Party. The Tory Party when in office did not propose it, and it is only under a Government of Liberals that so great and wise a measure could have been passed into law.

Political freedom therefore, and a real representation of the People, rich and poor, the country owes to the Liberal Party. But we owe much more to the Liberal Party.

We owe to it the repeal of the cruel Corn Law, and the removal of the hindrances to trade, caused by monstrous taxes on almost everything brought from foreign countries. The Corn Law, by shutting out foreign corn, was intended to keep the price of wheat at, or near, 80 shillings the quarter: its natural price without Corn Law is probably about 40 shillings the quarter.

Bread is, and will be, about half the price at which the Corn Law intended it to be in all years when English harvests were not good.

A great Minister, Sir Robert Peel, repealed the Corn Law. The agitation of the Anti-Corn Law League, the Irish famine in 1846, and the help and votes of the Liberals in Parliament, with the support of a portion of the Tories, gave him power to repeal this wicked and cruel law. Some of the Tories are now proposing to restore it, and again to make the Labourers’ bread dearer, so that Farmers may be able to pay rents which they say are too high unless the law is put in force to raise the market price of wheat, and the baker’s price of bread! The Tory Party and country gentlemen were very angry with Sir Robert Peel because he would not maintain the Corn Law. His Party deserted him, and drove him from office and from power because he preferred the interests of the nation, and the comforts of the labouring classes to dear bread, and high rents for the Landowners.

When the Corn Law was gone, other bad things went with it. The Liberal Government which came in after Sir Robert Peel destroyed the monopoly in sugar. Other great changes have been made, chiefly by Mr. Gladstone, supported always by the Liberals. The new Voters who are not young will remember the price of Bread in former days; they will know that Sugar is about one-third of the price it once was, and that they now can buy three pounds for the price they formerly paid for one pound; and they know that Tea costs less now than the tax alone which was imposed upon it before the Free-traders began the reform in our tariff and the