ABSTRACT
The Anti-Corn Law League appeared to possess all the advantages of a pressure group which the Chartists lacked. It represented the interests of an urban middle class whose influence the Whigs had recognized in 1832; the Chartists represented those who had been deliberately excluded from the franchise. The League's campaigns, drawing on commercial wealth, did not lack finance; the Chartists lived hand to mouth. Its objective was precise and limited - the removal of tariffs on the import of foreign corn; Chartism had precise objectives but their implications were limitless. Most important of all, the League advocated in free trade an objective for which many MPs already had considerable sympathy and one with an impeccable intellectual pedigree (Chs 5 and 21); democracy was both loathed and feared in most reaches of respectable society and by about 90 per cent of the membership of the Commons. It might seem that the League in the 1840s was pushing at an open door. Yet when Peel carried Corn Law repeal, the League's influence was at a low ebb. It will not do to characterize the repeal of the Corn Laws as the pre-ordained outcome of that middle-class pressure which the crisis of 1830-32 had taught the aristocracy it was powerless to resist. It is at least arguable that the Corn Laws would have been repealed even had the Anti-Corn Law League not existed.
