The Anti-Corn-Law League, with
which the names of Cobden and Bright are united as closely as those
two distinguished men were united in friendship, had in 1838 found a
centre eminently favourable to its operations in Manchester. Its
leaders were able, well-informed, and upright men, profoundly
convinced that their cause was just, and that the welfare of the
people was involved in their success or failure. They were men of the
middle class, acquainted intimately with the needs and doings of the
trading community to which they belonged, and therefore at once
better qualified to argue on questions affecting commerce, and less
directly interested in the prosperity of agriculture, than the more
aristocratic leaders of the nation. Both persuasive and successful
speakers, one of them supremely eloquent, they were able to interest
even the lowest populace in questions of political economy, and to
make Free Trade in Corn the idol of popular passion. Their mode of
agitation was eminently reasonable and wise; but it _was_ an
agitation, exciting wild enthusiasm and fierce opposition, and must
be reckoned not among the forces tending to quiet, but among those
that aroused anxious care in the first nine years of the reign.
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