s that the Irish famine made the
suspension of the corn laws a patent necessity. It is easy, then, to see
how great in England was the part played by external circumstances--one
might almost say by accidental conditions--in determining the overthrow
of protection. A student should further remark that after free trade
became an established principle of English policy, the majority of the
English people accepted it mainly on authority. Men who were neither
land-owners nor farmers perceived with ease the obtrusive evils of a tax
on corn, but they and their leaders were far less influenced by
arguments against protection generally than by the immediate and almost
visible advantage of cheapening the bread of artisans and laborers.
What, however, weighed with most Englishmen, above every other
consideration, was the harmony of the doctrine that commerce ought to be
free, with that disbelief in the benefits of state intervention which in
1846 had been gaining ground for more than a generation.

It is impossible, indeed, to insist too strongly upon the consideration
that whilst opinion controls legislation, public opinion is itself far
less the result of reasoning or of argument than of the circumstances in
which men are placed. Between 1783 and 1861 negro slavery was
abolished--one might almost say ceased of itself to exist--in the
northern states of the American Republic; in the South, on the other
hand, the maintenance of slavery developed into a fixed policy, and
before the War of Secession the "peculiar institution" had become the
foundation stone of the social system. But the religious beliefs and,
except as regards the existence of slavery, the political institutions
prevalent throughout the whole of the United States were the same. The
condemnation of slavery in the North, and the apologies for slavery in
the South, must therefore be referred to difference of circumstances.
Slave labor was obviously out of place in Massachusetts, Vermont, or New
York; it appeared to be, even if in reality it was not, economically
profitable in South Carolina. An institution, again, which was utterly
incompatible with the social condition of the northern states
harmonized, or appeared to harmonize, with the social conditions of the
southern states. The arguments against the peculiar institution were in
themselves equally strong in whatever part of the Union they were
uttered, but they carried conviction to the white citizens of
Massachus