The Reform Act of 1832, however, and the rapid increase of manufactures, transferred the balance of power in parliament from the landed to the manufacturing classes; factory hands were persuaded that the repeal of the duties would largely increase the value of their wages; and the failure of the potato-crop in Ireland in 1845-46 rendered an increase of imported food-stuffs imperative. Sir Robert Peel accordingly carried a measure in 1846 providing for the gradual abolition of the corn-duties, saving only a registration duty of one shilling, which was removed some twenty years later. This repeal of the Corn Laws did not appreciably affect the price of corn, the great reduction of which was subsequently effected by the vast expansion of corn-growing areas in the colonies and abroad. But it enormously increased the supply at once, and gradually gave England the full benefit of growing areas and declining prices. It is obvious that the retention of the duty, which had been fixed at 24_s_. 8_d_. in 1828 when the price was 62_s_. or less a quarter, would have prevented prices falling as they subsequently did below the value of the duty; and it is no less certain that it would have impeded the development of corn-growing districts in the colonies and abroad, and of British imports from, and exports to, them. The enormous increase in the import of corn helped, in fact, to double British exports within ten years. This was the result of the general freeing of trade, of which the repeal of the Corn Laws was only a part. In the third quarter of the eighteenth century there were hundreds of Acts, covering thousands of pages, on the statute-book, imposing an infinity of chaotic duties on every kind of import; they made the customs costly to collect and easy to evade; and the industry they stimulated most was smuggling. The younger Pitt, influenced by Adam Smith, whose _Wealth of Nations_ appeared in 1776, reduced and simplified these duties; but 443 Acts still survived when in 1825 Huskisson and other enlightened statesmen secured their consolidation and reduction to eleven. This Tariff Reform, as its supporters called it, was a step towards Free Trade. Peel gradually adopted its principles, induced partly by the failure of his efforts to use existing duties for purposes of retaliation; and between 1841 and 1846 he abolished the duties on 605 articles and reduced them on 1035 more, imposing a direct income-tax to replace the indirect taxes thus repealed. The process was completed by Gladstone, and what is called Free Trade was established as the fundamental principle of English financial policy.