ABSTRACT
Norman Gash has argued that to depict Peel as a supporter of a static economy ‘seems to defy common sense’. Well, it certainly defies that twentiethcentury common sense in which Gash is steeped, and it also defied the Cobdenite common sense of the 1840s. This is why it is important to realize (as Kinealy does) that Peel’s free-market instincts dated from the Huskissonite tradition of the 1820s. It follows that-in so far as he was motivated by ideology at all-it was by an earlier version of free-market economics in which a deep Malthusian pessimism as to the finite limits of the Earth’s natural resources ruled out any visions of economic growth. For Peel, freemarket or social-market economics was all about creating, not a growthoriented or simple opportunity society but a just society, in which personal merit would be naturally rewarded, in which ‘industry, sobriety, honesty, and intelligence’ would cause the poor to rise, while ‘idleness, profligacy, and vice’ would cause the rich to fall. In such a society of snakes and ladders, when human beings encountered economic distress (‘sufferings as difficult to remedy as they are deserved’), they could at least console themselves with the thought that such sufferings were natural, part of the ‘dispensations of providence’.
