in Parliament, attempted to safeguard their wartime economic position by securing, in 1815, a new Corn Law designed to keep up grain prices and rents by taxing imported grain. Their political power enabled them to maintain economic protection. Nonetheless, many of them suffered, particularly after 1819, when there was a return to the gold standard, from a serious fall of agricultural prices. Debts contracted during the wars became more onerous as prices fell. There were many complaints of agricultural distress during the early 1820s.Many of the industrialists, an increasingly vociferous group outside Parliament, resented the passing of the Corn Law because it favoured the landed interests. Others objected to the return of gold in 1819, which was put into effect in 1821. Whatever their outlook, industrialists were beginning to demand a voice in Parliament. The term middle classes began to be used more frequently in social and political debate.Town and village labourers were also unrepresented in Parliament, and it was they who bore the main brunt of the postwar difficulties. Bad harvests and high food prices left them hungry and discontented, and in the worst years, whenever bad harvests and industrial unemployment coincided, discontent assumed a political shape. Moreover, the development of a steam-driven factory system with new rhythms of work and new controls led to a breakdown in traditional family relationships and the growth of towns with structures of communication that were quite different from those of villages or preindustrial urban communities. These changes fostered the emergence, though it was not always shared, of the sense of a working class. There were radical riots in 1816, 1817, and particularly in 1819, the year of the Peterloo Massacre when there was a clash in Manchester between workers and troops of the yeomanry, or local citizenry.Early commentators were quick to recognize the debilitating effects of this military ...
