The background to the Corn Laws is this - during the napoleonic wars french agriculture was much reduced, and shipping was dangerous, so corn ['grain' to the US dialect] was imported to England much less than it had been previously, and so the price rose considerably
This led to a bubble in the price of land, and much land changed hands ... the new owners, some of whom had financed with debt, were hard pressed when commerce began to resume from 1816ish on ... labour was tight, due to increasing industrialisation, so that cost was rising for them ... landowners were way over-represented in parliament, so they voted themselves an iron corn-bowl, by fixing the price [actually by punitive tariffs on french corn once the english price fell below a ridiculously high figure, so they might as well have fixed the price directly]
For years of this period, it would take three fourths of a average workman's wages to buy enough corn to feed two adults and two small children ... at some points, corn rose even higher, a man alone could quite easily eat all the bread he could earn in a day's work ... this is one of the reasons for the rise in popularity of gin, which required less corn per intoxicative unit than did ales
Which all came about because a very few fantastically powerful men had the opportunity to vote themselves rich, and others poor .... an exact parallel with softwood lumber - the yellow pine lobby ruling the 'Commerce' department, and sticking it to millions of us in BC forestry and US homebuilding .... and there are no Peels or Cobdens around anymore ... |
