TH: (OBRN BILLS OF .82%.8. 165

shilling in the home price the duty was to go up two shil- ici
lings. The increase and decrease in the duty was always to Er. 28.
be double the fall and rise in the price. In other words,
"hen the average price reached seventy shillings, wheat
Wight be imported with a nominal duty of one shilling; on
the other hand, when the average price fell to fifty shillings,
the duty on foreign wheat would be forty shillings.
After the bill had passed the Commons, the Liverpool
Ministry fell to pieces, and a season of odious intrigue was
followed by the accession of Canning. The Corn Bill went
Up to the Lords in due course. The Duke of Wellington,
though he had been a member of the Liverpool cabinet by
Which the bill had been sanctioned, now moved an amend-Ment
 on it, and the new Ministry was defeated. Canning
tnd Huskisson let the bill drop, The event which so
Speedily followed is one of the tragic pages in the history of
English statesmen. Canning died a few weeks after the
close of the session ; Lord Goderich’s abortive Ministry
flickered into existence for four or five months, when it
flickered out again ; and before the end of the year the Duke
of Wellington was prime minister. The great soldier was a
berrow and sightiess statesman, and with his accession to
Power all the worse impulses of the privileged classes
d¢quired new confidence and intensity. In every sphere the
en of exclusion and restriction breathed more freely.
The Duke introduced a new Corn Bill. This bad measure
accepted Canning’s principle, if we may give the name of
Principle to an empirical device ; but it carried the principle
farther in the wrong direction. In the bill of 1827, the
Starting-point had been the exaction of a twenty shilling
duty, when the home price was sixty shillings the quarter.
According to the bill of 1828, when the price in the home
Harkey Was sixty-four shillings, the duty was twenty three
Shillings sud eightpence, The variations in the amount of