plied to commerce in general, was hardly | himself to the House of Commons in raisound when applied to national works ment which, though symbolical by its like railways. Still, in the construction gorgeousness of a dazzling policy, was of the Conservative party, and in placing it exactly on the right basis after the revolution of 1832, his practical sagacity did the work of genius. He was greatly helped in this by his commercial origin and his affinity to the middle class. The same influences were always drawing him towards alliance with such a man as Cobden, wide as the gulf between them might appear.

not likely to fascinate an unimaginative man of sense. He had approached his leader, both in public and in private, with fulsome flattery; and fulsome flattery, however successful it might be in other quarters, was not likely to succeed with Peel. Nor was anything to be gained by disparaging the Duke of Wellington, in whom Peel did not see a rival, and whom, though little guided by his counsels, he always treated with the tenderest respect. After all, there is a tradition that Peelalways tolerant, though not appreciative, of the vagaries of talent, and ever anxious to enlist it for the party wished to give Disraeli place, but was prevented by the opposition of Lord Stanley. Whan his papers are published it will be found, I suspect, that he afterwards treated Disraeli with a magnanimity which may be thought by some to have been rather becoming in him than clearly consistent with the public good.

In one respect he stands almost by himself. It would be difficult at least to name any leader who had left the country such a bequest of statesmen. In drawing young men to him he had to get over the difficulties of his extreme shyness, and of a manner at first icy, though Lord Aberdeen said of him that when he did open himself he was the most confiding of mankind. He had also to get over a certain formality of judgment and want of sympathy with anything eccentric or sentimental, natural to him, no doubt, but confirmed by the habits of a life spent in business of To do right in the question between State, with little time for reading, intel- Cobden and Peel while they were in collilectual intercourse, or speculation of any sion, we must remember that Cobden was kind. From the personal jealousy which leading an agitation in the interest of a sometimes narrows the choice of asso- particular class. The class was large, ciates he was free, as he showed by the and its interest on this occasion coincided eagerness with which he welcomed to his with that of the community, otherwise it side Stanley, in whose unquiet ambition could not have had Cobden and Bright and aristocratic arrogance his sagacity for spokesmen; but still it was a class. could hardly fail to see the probable With Cobden and Bright the repeal of source of trouble to himself. The shade the Corn Law was part of a general policy of Peel may proudly ask what those who of free trade, and free trade itself was but charged him with want of sympathy with a part of a still more general policy of genius have left to eclipse his staff. In peace and good-will among nations, econone instance he has been accused-and omy, and government in the interest of will, no doubt, be accused again-of a the people. But the object of most of the fatal oversight. But the accusers must manufacturers who were members of the remember that the Disraeli of 1841 was League was simply the repeal of a noxious not the Lord Beaconsfield of a later time. impost, which specially pressed on their The Disraeli of 1841 had announced him- own industry. They were not universal self under the name of Vivian Grey as an philanthropists; they were hardly even unscrupulous adventurer, bent on gratify-free-traders in the full sense of the term. ing his ambition, not by the qualities which Peel valued in a public servant, but by skill in intrigue; he had verified that announcement by seeking election to Parliament first as a Radical, and immediately afterwards as a Tory; and he had been denounced for so doing by public men whose confidence and whose names he had, as they thought, abused. He had signified the intention which, in the case of Lord Derby, he, with incomparable skill and knowledge of character, carried into effect, of using his political leader as a Marquis of Carabas. He had presented

Their subscriptions to the League Fund were what Cobden himself called them, investments, which they expected to be repaid to them, and which were in fact repaid to them a hundredfold. Had the same men been landowners, they would probably have been protectionists. To the general policy of Bright and Cobden their attachment was very equivocal, as the sequel showed, and as Cobden himself has told us:

I am of opinion that we have not the same elements in Lancashire for a Democratic Reform movement as we had for Free Trade.

snobs of the towns.

You hint at the possibility of Manchester taking me in case of poor Potter's death. I don't think the offer will ever be made, but I am quite sure that there is no demonstration of the kind that could induce me (apart from my determination not at present to stand for any place) to put myself in the hands of the people who, without more cause then than now, struck down men whose politics are identically my own. To confess my honest belief, I regard the Manchester constituency, now that their gross pocket question is settled, as a very unsound, and to us a very unsafe body.

The manufacturers of Yorkshire and Lan: cashire look upon India and China as a field of enterprise, which can only be kept open to them by force; and, indeed, they are willing apparently to be at all the cost of holding open the door of the whole of Asia for the rest of the world to trade on the same terms as themselves. How few of those who fought for the repeal of the Corn Law really understand the full meaning of Free Trade principles !

To me the most discouraging fact in our politi- | growth of manufactures, it has evidently cal state is the condition of the Lancashire come at last, and seems likely to bring its boroughs, where, with the exception of Man- political consequences with it. The prechester, nearly all the municipalities are in the diction of evil to the landed interest hands of the stupidest Tories in England, and which events appeared to have belied, has where we can hardly see our way for an equal been apparently fulfilled after all; for half-share of Liberal representation. We have the labor of Hercules in hand to abate the some time past at least, the extent of Enpower of the aristocracy, and their allies the glish land under the plough has been rapidly decreasing. There was some force also in the military argument against dependence on the foreigner for food; it seemed that the island fortress would lose its impregnability; and Peel could not accept, and would have been entirely misled if he had accepted, as infallibly true the Leaguers' assurance that free trade would be followed by universal peace. Economical fallacies, which experience has now taught us to deride, then fettered strong minds; nor would a statesman, when he began to meditate the great change, have felt that he had any great force of independent opinion on his side. The sudden conversion of the Whigs was, as Mr. Morley truly says, nothing more than the device of a foundering faction. So long as they had a secure tenure of power, and were able to control legislation, they declared that to meddle with the Corn Law would be madness. They even, after the failure of their attempt Men may be named, besides Cobden "to set fire to the house which they were and Bright, who did thoroughly under- leaving," showed rather faint attachment stand the meaning of the principle, and to their new opinions, and their chiefs its connection with principles larger still; declined to vote for Mr. Villiers's annual but with the rank and file of the move- motion in 1844. Peel had, however, ment free trade meant nothing but an avowed in the most distinct terms that alteration of the tariff in their own favor.unless the Corn Law was shown to be Peel, on the other hand, was the ruler of the whole nation, and was bound to consider not one class or interest alone, but all. He was also bound to consider political as well as economical consequences. The aristocracy personally he loved little, and had little cause to love: it accepted his services without ever forgetting that he was by origin a cottonspinner; and that he stood aloof from it in heart was shown by his testamentary injunction to his son. But he be lieved it to be an essential part of the constitution, and he saw plainly that its basis was territorial, or, in plain English, that its influence depended on its rents. It was very well for the League to say that the landowners would not suffer by repeal; the League cared little whether the landowners suffered or not: and the truth is that though the reduction of rents was suspended for a time by the enormous extension of the English market for agricultural produce which followed the

good for the whole people, it could not stand; and his freedom in dealing with it had already driven extreme protectionists, such as the Duke of Buckingham, from his side. The general tendency of his financial policy was also distinctly in the direction of free trade. For a man in his position, and under the party system, the process of change, as has been already said, was desperately difficult, and the utmost allowance ought to be made for anything ambiguous in his utterances or in his conduct. He was the object not only of cruel misconstruction, but of calumnious invention on the part of enemies who certainly could not like him to be accused of lacking imagination. It was most circumstantially stated and widely believed, that when he found himself no longer able to defend the Corn Law he had contrived to shirk a debate, and to put forward his young lieutenant, Sidney Herbert, to defend the Corn Law in his place. He was of all men the least

the statesman who had brought in the repeal of the Corn Law.

about to take. For the charge of simu- | Cobden tacitly acquiesced. Peel must lating emotion Mr. Morley is of course have known very well that the letter would able to cite the authority of Disraeli. Yet be eminently honorable to the memory of nobody who knows Peel's history can both of them, and especially to that of doubt that, like other members of his fam- the writer, who thus buried in a moment ily, he had a hot temper, though it was all past enmities, forgot all selfish rivalusually under strict control. It is impos-ries, and threw himself into the arms of sible to suppose that he was "acting the part of the choleric gentleman" in the tempestuous scene which occurred when Parliament was dissolved upon the rejection of the Reform Bill. As little was he open to the imputation of cowardice: he was sensitive to pain; all men of fine organization are; and there are traces in his correspondence of his having been rather nervous, or of somebody having been nervous for him, about plots: but I believe I am right in saying that, besides his affair with O'Connell, whom he desperately strove to drag into the field, he on three other occasions displayed his anachronistic propensity to fight duels. I know that it was with the utmost difficulty that, by an appeal to his feeling for the queen, he was dissuaded from sending a challenge to Lord George Bentinck, who had touched his honor on a point on which it was particularly sensitive, by traducing the integrity of his relations with his friends. It may be surmised that his equivocal position in the society of those days as a cotton-spinner among aristocrats, made him rather more peppery in resenting insult than he would otherwise have been. What is certain is that, if readiness to look on the muzzle of a pistol is a proof of courage, Peel cannot have been a coward.

All soon came right between him and Cobden. The two soldiers of the same cause, under opposite standards and in hostile uniforms, recognized each other and clasped hands. Cobden wrote Peel, whose defeat by the coalition of Whigs and protectionists on the Coercion Bill was then impending, a confidential letter promising him hearty support, conjuring him to dissolve Parliament, and assuring him if he would of an immense victory. He desired Peel to burn the letter. Peel kept it, and, as Mr. Morley says, a question may be raised by those who occupy themselves about minor morals. But Peel in his answer says, "I need not give you the assurance that I shall regard your letter as a communication more purely confidential than if it had been written to me by some person united to me by the closest bonds of private friendship." That is to "I have not burned the letter, but I say, will keep it a dead secret; " and in this

Had Peel taken Cobden's advice and dissolved, no doubt Cobden's prediction would have been fulfilled. There would have been a total rout of the protectionists, and among others, the member for Shrewsbury would have lost his seat. But Peel could not, without a scandalous disregard of old ties, have appealed to the country against his own party. Nor could he have vaulted at once from the leadership of the Conservatives to the leadership of the Liberals, which was what Cobden in effect proposed. It is, in short, difficult to see how he could have done anything but what he did. Those who, like the author of the "Life of Lord George Bentinck," accuse him of "astuteness," and of manoeuvring for the retention of his place, are met by the fact that, on finding his Cabinet divided, he resigned, and that Lord John Russell was prevented from forming a government only by an objection among his own friends to the appointment of Palmerston as foreign minister, which no astuteness in Peel could have foreseen, much less have contrived. It has been plausibly urged, and the writer of this paper used to think, that Peel ought to have held a meeting of his party: if he was prevented from taking that course in any degree by want of frankness and moral courage, or even by a punctilious tenacity of his own authority as minister, to that extent he did wrong; but it was certain that there would be a disagreement at the meeting, probable that there would be a scene of great violence. What Stanley, Disraeli, and their section wanted above all things was to produce a split; and the consequence would have been that the quarrel in the House would only have been made more desperate and scandalous. The result, however, was inevitable, nor was it otherwise than welcome to Peel, who was careworn, exhausted, ill in body, and deeply wounded by the quarrel with old friends. He fell from office, but not from

.

The author of the "Life of Lord George Bentinck" calls this an intrigue. Everybody was an ininflexibly upright and thoroughly straightforward of triguer but he. The objector was about the most public men.

In spite of their conflicts Peel and Cobden were really united in their political lives, and it may be said that in death they were not divided. Neither of them was buried in Westminster Abbey. Peel lies among his family and neighbors, Cobden lies in a country churchyard. A man who has worked for fame will like to rest in a pantheon; a man who has worked for duty and for the approbation of the power of duty will perhaps prefer to rest by the side of honest labor, and among those whom he has loved.

power: he remained the leading man in | he had been a suitor for place. The proEngland; and had not his life been acci-gressive domination of such characters is dentally cut short, the voice of the nation the inherent tendency of the party system. would almost certainly have recalled him to the helm. On that point the author of "Latter-Day Pamphlets was quite right. Peel's failure to make his party turn round with him in 1846 has been contrasted with the success of the Tory leaders in 1867. But Mr. Morley aptly replies that the second was a case of political principle, while the first was a case of pocket. Besides this, in 1867 expedients were used which were quite unknown to Peel; the Tories were not so much persuaded as decoyed: a minister put up to say that the House of Commons would Free trade still stands pretty much never grant household suffrage, and the where it stood on the morrow of the recpitfall in which that revolutionary meas-onciliation of Cobden with Peel. Their ure lurked was carefully covered with visions Cobden's visions at least. personal payment of rates. What is still have not been fulfilled. The reason has more important, between 1846 and 1867 been already given. England, while she the party had undergone a most effective preaches free trade, and thinks all the process of education. world demented because it will not listen to her preaching, is herself not a freetrade nation. She raises twenty millions by import duties which, though admirably well adjusted to her special circumstances, are not the less interferences with freedom of trade. Every nation has its tariff, every nation will continue to have its tariff so long as money for establishments and armaments is required: and for tariffs, as was said before, there is no absolute rule; each country must be allowed to frame its own. Cobden assumed that the world was a single community; he could not bring the human race to that far-off goal of philanthropy, though he did something to help it on its way.

Still, there is a moral to be drawn. The one man in whom the nation trusted, and had reason to trust, was driven from power because he had carried a measure which was urgently needed to give the people bread, and which was soon to be ratified by universal approbation, even those who had most rancorously assailed its author at the time acquiescing as soon as acquiescence became necessary to them as a passport to place. The coalition against the Coercion Bill, by which this was brought about, consisted of three elements: Conservatives who had themselves supported the Coercion Bill in its earlier stage; Whigs to whom coercion was familiar, and who, as soon as they had tripped up Peel, resorted to it again; and Radicals who were then, as they are now, unused to government, hardly conscious of its necessities, unready to avow republicanism, but ready to make unlimited concessions to all who demanded them, and let Irish insurgents or any one who would tear to pieces the heritage of the commonwealth. The one great gainer by the transaction was a man whose motives were purely personal, as he used afterwards very frankly to avow; who, on a question affecting not a mere political theory, but the subsistence of the people who were starving round him, was taking a course contrary to his often recorded convictions, and traducing with laborious virulence the character and career of a statesman whom he knew to be doing right, on whom a little time before he had been lavishing his adulation, and to whom

It seems at the present moment as if the same thing might be said with too much truth about the Irish question. It was upon a Coercion Bill that the Peel government fell, Cobden voting against the bill, though apparently more because this was the regular line of his political section than in obedience to any strong opinion of his own. His biographer's hostility to such measures is more decided. "The Ministry," he says, "resorted for the eighteenth time since the Union to the stale device of a Coercion Bill, that stereotyped avowal-and always made, strange to say, without shame or contrition of the secular neglect and incompetency of the English government of Ireland." Sir Robert Peel was not incompetent, nor had he neglected the Irish question; on the contrary, he had studied it for thirty years with all the advantages which a successive tenure of the