After the war in 1946 Hirst published "The Repeal of the Corn Laws" in which he compared the privations of the 1940s to the "hungry forties" of the previous century. Two days after the centenary of Corn Law repeal the Labour government introduced bread rationing for the first time. In 1947 he published "In the Golden Days", an autobiography which terminated in 1906. He noted that Samuel Smiles' "book on the virtues of thrift has been lost and obliterated in an age of borrowing and bankruptcy".