广西大学本科毕业论文（设计）
致谢辞
在本次论文设计过程中，感谢我的学校，给了我学习的机会，在学习中，王老师从选题指导、论文框架到细节修改，都给予了细致的指导，提出了很多宝贵的意见与建议，王老师以其严谨求实的治学态度、高度的敬业精神、和大胆创新的进取精神对我产生重要影响，他开阔的视野和敏锐的思维给了我深深的启迪，在此向他表示由衷的感谢。 感谢所有授我以业的老师，和给予我宝贵建议的同学，这些年知识的积淀，给了我足够的动力和信心完成这篇论文。感恩之余，诚恳地请各位老师对我的论文多加批评指正，使我及时完善论文的不足之处。
谨以此致谢最后，我要向百忙之中抽时间对本文进行审阅的各位老师表示衷心的感谢！
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广西大学本科毕业论文（设计）
附录
附录1: 原文
A PEOPLE?S HISTORY OF ENGLAND
by A.L.MORTON
XIII Liberal Ascendancy ...
Under these circumstances the elections of 1841 resulted in a Tory victory and the formation of a government headed by Peel. The landowners were intensely relieved, but economic necessity soon pushed the new Government along the road to Free Trade and the repeal of the Corn Laws.
2. The Corn Laws
The Corn Laws of 1815 were the last clear-cut victory of the landowners as a class in England, but it was a suicidal victory because it inevitably isolated them from every other class and enabled the industrialists to pose, however hypocritically, as the champions of the whole people against a selfish and monopolising minority. The object of the Corn Laws was frankly to keep the price of wheat at the famine level it had reached during the Napoleonic Wars, when supplies from Poland and France were wholly or partly prevented from reaching England.1 All wheat imports were forbidden when the price fell below 50s. the quarter. From the beginning the Corn Laws were hated by everyone except the landowners and farmers, and even the latter found that in practice the fluctuations in wheat prices were ruinously violent and that the market was often manipulated so as to rob them of the profits they might have expected to make.Attempts in 1828 and 1842 to improve the Laws by introducing a sliding
1
Even at the height of the war, in 1811, Napoleon was forced by the distress of the peasants of North France to allow corn to
be exported to England. In other years the trade was often winked at the authorities.
scale were not successful. Opposition to the Corn Laws, coupled with demands for Parliamentary Reform, were widespread throughout the Peterloo period, but died down after 1820,to be revived again by the coming of the industrial depression of 1837. This time it was an agitation not so much of the mass of the people as of the industrial bourgeoisie anxious to reduce labour costs.
From 1838, when the Anti-Corn Law League was formed by Cobden and Bright, it contended with the Chartists for the leadership of the working class. “The people,” wrote Marx in 1848, “see in these self-sacrificing gentlemen, in Bowring, Bright and Co., their
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广西大学本科毕业论文（设计）
worst enemies and the most shameless hypocrites. Everyone knows that in England the struggle between Liberals and Democrats takes the name of the struggle between Free Traders and Chartists.” Chartists organized counter-demonstrations to those of the League, brought the League speakers face to face with the facts of their condition, and in some industrial towns made it impossible for the League to hold meetings except those of their own supporters admitted by ticket. And C. R. Fay, the latest historian of the Corn Laws, describes how in the summer of 1842, the time of the great Lancashire turn out, “The red-hot orators of the League were transformed into pale policemen. The Delegates left London for the North, to keep there the peace of Her Majesty, whom Peel and Graham (the Tory Home Secretary) served.” Nevertheless the Chartist agitation, which made the quarrel of Leaguers and Tories sound like the chattering of the children, was one of the factors which had most to do with securing the repeal of the Corn Laws. Before menace of revolution the warring sections of the ruling class were forced to sink their differences and, besides the repeal, to pass a Factory Act, a Coal Mines Act and the Ten Hour Act of 1847. It was the working class more than “rotten potatoes” that “put Peel in his damned fright.”
It would be a mistake, too, to imagine that the League?s agitation was without effect on the workers. Unprecedented in scale and lavishly financed (￡100,000 was collected in 1843 and 9,000,000 leaflets distributed) this agitation had all the advantages that the railways, cheap newspapers and the penny post could give. Whenever Cobden or Bright spoke their words were widely reported in scores of papers and the League orators were able to move swiftly and easily all over the country. They had facilities for spreading the Free Trade gospel that Pym and even Cobbett could never even had imagined.
In the light of this continued outside pressure, combined with the plain fact, which was becoming generally understood, that the growth of population was making it impossible for England to feed herself, the hesitating steps taken by Peel towards Free Trade after 1841 must be traced.
The first of these steps was dictated by the confused finance which he took over from the Whigs. A mass of tariffs and duties were swept away and replaced by an income tax which was both simpler and more productive, and in the long run less burdensome upon industry. These tariffs, being industrial, were not defended by Peel?s landowning supporters.
But the effect of their disappearance, whether intended or not, was to leave the Corn Laws as an isolated anomaly, increasingly conspicuous and increasingly difficult to defend. In these years Peel appears to have made a thorough study of the situation and to have realised that the belief common among the landowners that vast stores of wheat were lying in the Baltic granaries ready to be poured into England was a pure fantasy. He knew, what few people on either side knew, that the surplus for export in any country was still quite small and that the most the repeal of the Corn Laws would do would be to prevent an otherwise
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广西大学本科毕业论文（设计）
inevitable rise in prices which might have had revolutionary consequences. He was, therefore, quite prepared, when the Irish famine provided him with an excuse, to force through the repeal against the will of the majority of his own supporters.
Before this point was reached, however, there was a political crisis with important results. Faced in the winter of 1845 with a revolt inside the Tory Party, Peel resigned. The Whigs, who had been forced by the pace set by the League to declare for complete repeal, set about forming a government. Suddenly, and on the thinnest of excuses, Lord John Russell announced that he would not form a government and handed back the responsibility to Peel. For once, an act of unashamed political cowardice was overwhelmingly rewarded. By forcing Peel to destroy the Corn Laws with Whig support, Russell precipitated a break within the Tory Party which left it helpless for twenty years.
The revolt against Peel was led by a young and most unknown Jewish politician, Benjamin Disraeli, and it was Disraeli who re-created the Tory Party at the beginning of the age of imperialism, no longer primarily as a party of the landowners but as the party of the new power of finance capital. When Peel died in 1850 a number of the Tory Free Traders joined the Whigs. Among them was William Ewart Gladstone, then aged 41.
The Corn Laws were repealed in June 1846, a small, temporary tariff being retained till 1849. The effect was hardly what had been expected. There was no fall in prices, in fact the average for the five years 1851-5 was 56s. against 54s. 9d. in the five years 1841-5. For this there were a number of reasons: increasing population and a greater demand due to the revival of industry, bad harvests in a number of years and the Crimean War in 1853 which interrupted the import of wheat from Poland. New but relatively small sources of supply were opened up in Turkey, the U.S.A. and elsewhere, and it is quite obvious that if the Corn Laws had been in operation prices would have been still higher. Later still, the American Civil War interrupted the export of corn for several years, and it was not till about 1870, when the great wheat belt of the Middle West had been opened up by railways, that really large quantities of corn began to come in.
The manufacturers gained by repeal not through the cheapening of food, which had been their main argument when trying to win popular support, but by a larger flow of imports and a steadily expanding market for their goods. Thus, as the import of wheat from the Levant increased, so the export of Lancashire cottons rose from ￡141,000 in 1843 to ￡1,000,000 in 1854.
In this respect the repeal of the Corn Laws must be regarded as part of whole Free Trade legislation which helped to make the period between 1845 and 1875 the golden age of the manufacturers. Free Trade in corn was followed by Free Trade in sugar, and, finally, in 1860, in timber. Until the growth of industries abroad, nothing now stood between the British manufacturer and the markets of the world.
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广西大学本科毕业论文（设计）
Engels sums up the whole period thus:
“The years immediately following the victory of Free Trade in England seemed to verify the most extravagant expectations of prosperity founded upon that event. British commerce rose to a fabulous amount: the industrial monopoly of England on the market of the world seemed more firmly established than ever: new iron works, new textile factories, arose wholesale; new branches of industry grew up on every side. The unparalleled expansion of British manufactures and commerce between 1848 and 1866 was no doubt due, to a great extent, to the removal of protective duties on food and raw materials. But not entirely. Other important changes took place simultaneously and helped it on. The above years comprise the discovery and working of the Californian and Australian goldfields which increased so immensely the circulating medium of the world; they mark the final victory of steam over all other means of transport; on the ocean, steamers now superseded sailing vessels; on land in all civilised countries, the railroad took the first place, the macadamized road the second; transport now became four times quicker and four times cheaper. No wonder that under such favourable circumstances British manufactures based on steam should extend their way at the expense of foreign domestic industries based upon manual labour.”
Times were good for the British capitalists, and they regarded their good fortune as a law of nature and expected it to last for ever.
The effects of Corn Law repeal upon agriculture were much more surprising, unless they are regarded as a parallel to those of the Factory Acts upon industry. Instead of ruin, increased prosperity, instead of the acreage under the plough contracting, an expansion. The mere threat of foreign competition led to a number of improvements in technique. As compensation for their loss of the Corn Laws the landowners in Parliament advanced themselves money for improvements at a very low rate of interest, thus enabling themselves to add to the value of their land and make a handsome profit out of the farmers who were charged for the improvements at a considerably higher rate.
A machine for pipe making, invented in 1845, made land drainage possible on a large scale. This added greatly to the productivity of the heavy wheat-growing land, made it more workable and made the use of artificial manures profitable. Nitrates, guano and bone manure all came into common use at this time. Must new machinery was introduced, so that at the Royal Agricultural Society?s Show in 1853 no fewer than 2,000 implements were exhibited. A more direct stimulus to the use of machinery was given by the increase in the wages of farm workers which took place between 1845 and 1859 as the result of the great demand for labour in the mines, in the construction of railways, ect. In time, this increase in the use of machinery led to a reduction in the number of labourers employed, although the area under cultivation had increased by half a million acres and the total agricultural production had increased far more in proportion.
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