Our attorney may enjoy carpentry and decide to do the job himself-a valid emotional choice, but not an economically rational one. Alas, Principles, and Ricardo himself, arrived too late to save England from the draconian Corn Law of The corn laws , he wrote, impeded the purchase of foreign grain and forced England to waste its precious labor in less productive farmwork.
At first, confusion reigned over exactly how to implement the scheme; Cobden suggested "something similar to the stamp on patent medicines, something to be affixed by the party with gum on the envelope, then stamped at the post office," the result being modem adhesive postage.
Further, the Anti- Corn Law League could tap into the wealth of the mill owners, the very wellspring of the Industrial Revolution's riches. The combination of generous funding and cheap postage enabled the League to blanket England's pitifully small number of voters just 7 percent of adult males after the Reform Act of In , John Stuart Mill calculated that although the Corn Laws put a certain amount of extra money in the pockets of the landlords, these laws cost the nation as a whole several times more.
He theorized that it would be far cheaper to buy the landlords off: The landlords should make an estimate of their probable losses from the repeal of the Corn Laws , and found upon it a claim to compensation. Some, indeed, may question how far they who, for their own emolument, imposed one of the worst of taxes upon their countrymen [i. Both were eloquent and tireless proponents of free trade, though in each case — untypically — their radicalism reached past the Corn Laws , to electoral and land reform, an end to primogeniture, and religious disestablishment.
Agitation revived at the onset of the economic crisis of , with the almost simultaneous birth of Chartism and the Anti- Corn Law League.
