“_Shamefully insensible to the suffering and distress which were painfully apparent throughout the land._” “O’Connell declared that many thousands of persons had to subsist in Ireland _on three half-pence per day_.” A tolerably successful workingman sometimes got sixty-five cents a week, and the price of the four-pound loaf was _twenty-five cents_. * * * * * From 1830 to 1836 matters went from bad to worse. Business was depressed, trade stagnant, poverty severe in many parts of the country. In 1838 a crisis came. Three-fifths of the manufacturing establishments of Lancashire shut down. Thousands of workmen were thrown adrift, moneyless, foodless, desperate. It was then that three great men, Cobden, Bright and Villiers, seized the leadership of Discontent and began the famous crusade against _Protection_, as typified in the Corn Laws of Great Britain. “Vested interests,” of course, raised the usual howl. The land monopolists stubbornly closed up in lines of sullen opposition to reform. They beat off every attack, pocketing year after year the famine prices which the people were compelled to pay for bread. Suddenly, in the summer of 1845, a cold, wet, sunless season fell upon the British Isles and the whole potato crop of Ireland—the sole dependence of the vast majority of the Irish people—rotted. The food of Ireland was gone; in her poverty she could not pay the English landlord’s price for bread, and the Corn Laws forbade her buying the cheap bread of America and Continental Europe. It was _then_ that Lord John Russell attacked the whole system of _Protection_ as “_the blight of commerce, the bane of agriculture, the source of bitter divisions among classes_, THE CAUSE OF PENURY, FEVER AND CRIME AMONG THE PEOPLE.” It was _then_ that the great Tory Minister, Sir Robert Peel, followed the promptings of his heart and determined that the people should have cheaper food. He abolished the Corn Laws, and conferred inestimable blessings upon the common people of his country. The noble act cost him his political life—for that was the penalty which outraged land monopoly, led by Disraeli, inflicted upon its former chief. * * * * * The Corn Laws were repealed in 1846. Mr. Dennis comes along and tells us that _Free Trade_ is responsible for “Hooligan”—for poverty in England. Mr. Rider Haggard—now in this country in the interest of Hooligan—ought to know as much about the poor of Great Britain as Dennis knows. What does Rider Haggard say? That the present deplorable condition of the English poor _began with_ 1874. How, then, can that condition be connected with the Corn Law repeal? May it not be logically connected with legislation of more recent date? Or may it not be connected with economic developments elsewhere?