st partially self-supporting, and was
further justified on the ground that the landowners paid the great
bulk of the taxes, which they could not do if the price of grain were
allowed to be brought down by foreign competition. Nevertheless an
active propaganda for the abolition of this law was begun by the
formation of the "Anti-Corn Law League," in 1839. Richard Cobden
became the president and the most famous representative of this
society, which carried on an active agitation for some years. The
chief interest in the abolition of the law would necessarily be taken
by the manufacturing employers, the wages of whose employees could
thus be made lower and more constant, but there were abundant other
arguments against the laws, and their abandonment was entirely in
conformity with the spirit of the age. At the close of 1845,
therefore, Peel proposed their repeal, the matter was brought up in
Parliament in the early months of 1846, and a sliding scale was
adopted by which a slight temporary protection should continue until
1849, when any protective tariff on wheat was to cease altogether,
though a nominal duty of about one and a half pence a bushel was still
to be collected. This is known as the "adoption of free trade."

It remains to be noted in this connection that "free trade in land"
was an expression often used during the same period, and consisted in
an effort marked by a long series of acts of Parliament and
regulations of the courts to simplify the title to land, the processes
of buying and selling it, and in other ways making its use and
disposal as simple and uncontrolled by external regulation as was
commerce or any form of industry.

Thus the structure of regulation of industry, which had been built up
in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, or which had survived from
the Middle Ages, was now torn down; the use of the powers of
government to make men carry on their economic life in a certain way,
to buy and sell, labor and hire, manufacture and cultivate, export and
import, only in such ways as were thought to be best for the nation,
seemed to be entirely abandoned. The _laissez-faire_ view of
government was to all appearances becoming entirely dominant.

*63. Individualism.*--But the prevailing tendencies of thought and the
economic teaching of the period were not merely negative and opposed
to government regulation; they contained a positive element also. If
there was to be no external control, what