ABSTRACT
‘Anglicanus’ responded to Peel’s attack on the Protectionist policy of the Conservative Party with a spirited defence of Disraeli’s speech and a renewed critique of Peel’s own Party, in a speech on 6 July 1849, Describing Peel’s intervention as ‘the flimsy rags of unscrupulous sophistry’, it criticised him for seizing upon the ‘weak’ point in Disraeli’s speech, the dating of prosperity to 1846, as an opportunity for vindicating his own policies in government.
The pamphlet identified colonial rebellion, Irish insurrection, and the paralysis of native industry, amongst the ills which Disraeli’s motion had highlighted and which Peel’s policy had stimulated. It criticised Disraeli for failing to mention the Bank Charter Act as one of the causes of the present distress, noting that ‘every attempt to accomplish his views’ for equalising the tax system and raising the condition of agriculture and commerce would be ‘succeeded by failure’ until that Act was revised.
The argument proceeded to a detailed discussion of the state of agriculture in the United States and the corresponding burdens suffered by the agricultural interest in Britain. ‘We are evidently advancing towards the period when the reduction of wages, employment, and rents, will create a revolution in this country, which is at present but faintly shadowed forth’, the pamphlet maintained.
‘Anglicanus’ thought that the state of Ireland was perilous, and the proffered solutions were inadequate: ‘We should like to know by what process the building of additional workhouses and administering in-door relief to the poor can regenerate the people of Ireland’.
The pamphlet contested Peel’s vindication of his government’s Free Trade policies, decrying the anonymous testimony quoted in his speech. ‘The letters referred to … from private individuals, afford no satisfactory evidence by which we can judge of the state of national industry’, it argued, citing ‘official evidence’ as a better means of throwing ‘light on the progress of national industry’.
The writer also criticised Peel’s ‘predilection for triple divisions; everything with him has “three courses”’. Whilst admitting that ‘the data upon which’ Disraeli’s arguments were founded were ‘incomplete and too general [the] question is of too much importance to pass over superficially’. ‘Anglicanus’ was in no doubt that ‘in pronouncing judgment upon the arguments of his Opponent, [Peel had] established the unsoundness of his own’.
