to them a fantastic form of riot.  They found that it was said of old to Rebecca, “Let thy seed possess the gate of those which hate them,” and ere long “Rebecca and her children,” men masking in women’s clothes, made fierce war by night on the “gates” they detested, destroying the turnpikes and driving out their keepers.  These raids were not always bloodless.  The Government succeeded in repressing the rioting, and then, finding that a real grievance had caused it, did away with the oppressive tolls, and dealt not too hardly with the captured offenders; leniency which soon restored Wales to tranquillity.

[Illustration:  Richard Cobden.]

[Illustration:  John Bright.]

A peaceful, strictly constitutional, and finally successful agitation ran its steady course in England for several years contemporaneously with those we have already enumerated.  The Anti-Corn-Law League, with which the names of Cobden and Bright are united as closely as those two distinguished men were united in friendship, had in 1838 found a centre eminently favourable to its operations in Manchester.  Its leaders were able, well-informed, and upright men, profoundly convinced that their cause was just, and that the welfare of the people was involved in their success or failure.  They were men of the middle class, acquainted intimately with the needs and doings of the trading community to which they belonged, and therefore at once better qualified to argue on questions affecting commerce, and less directly interested in the prosperity of agriculture, than the more aristocratic leaders of the nation.  Both persuasive and successful speakers, one of them supremely eloquent, they were able to interest even the lowest populace in questions of political economy, and to make Free Trade in Corn the idol of popular passion.  Their mode of agitation was eminently reasonable and wise; but it was an agitation, exciting wild enthusiasm and fierce opposition, and must be reckoned not among the forces tending to quiet, but among those that aroused anxious care in the first nine years of the reign.  And it was a terrible calamity that at last placed victory within their grasp.  The blight on the potato first showed itself in 1845—­a new, undreamed-of disaster, probably owing to the long succession of unfavourable seasons.  And the potato blight meant almost certainly famine in Ireland, where perhaps three-fourths of the population had no food but this root.  The food supply of a whole nation seemed on the point of being cut off.  A loud demand was made for “the opening of the ports.”  By existing laws the ports admitted foreign grain tinder import duties varying in severity inversely with the fluctuating price of home-grown grain; thus a certain high level in the cost of corn was artificially maintained.  These regulations, though framed for the protection of the native producer, did not bear so heavily on the consumer as the law of 1815 which they replaced; and the principle represented