list not only over the landed
aristocracy, but over those sections of capitalists, too, whose
interests were more or less bound up with the landed
interest,--bankers, stock-jobbers, fund-holders, etc. Free Trade
meant the re-adjustment of the whole home and foreign, commercial and
financial policy of England in accordance with the interests of the
manufacturing capitalists--the class which now represented the nation.
And they set about this task with a will. Every obstacle to
industrial production was mercilessly removed. The tariff and the
whole system of taxation were revolutionised. Everything was made
subordinate to one end, but that end of the utmost importance to the
manufacturing capitalist: the cheapening of all raw produce, and
especially of the means of living of the working-class; the reduction
of the cost of raw material, and the keeping down--if not as yet the
_bringing down_--of wages. England was to become the 'workshop of the
world;' all other countries were to become for England what Ireland
already was,--markets for her manufactured goods, supplying her in
return with raw materials and food. England the great manufacturing
centre of an agricultural world, with an ever-increasing number of
corn and cotton-growing Irelands revolving around her, the industrial
sun. What a glorious prospect!

"The manufacturing capitalists set about the realisation of this their
great object with that strong common sense and that contempt for
traditional principles which has ever distinguished them from their
more narrow-minded compeers on the Continent. Chartism was dying out.
The revival of commercial prosperity, natural after the revulsion of
1847 had spent itself, was put down altogether to the credit of Free
Trade. Both these circumstances had turned the English working-class,
politically, into the tail of the 'great Liberal party,' the party led
by the manufacturers. This advantage, once gained, had to be
perpetuated. And the manufacturing capitalists, from the Chartist
opposition, not to Free Trade, but to the transformation of Free Trade
into the one vital national question, had learnt, and were learning
more and more, that the middle-class can never obtain full social and
political power over the nation except by the help of the
working-class. Thus a gradual change came over the relations between