The Constitutional History of England From 1760 to 1860

CHAPTER XII. Sir Robert Peel becomes Prime-minister.-Commercial Reforms.- Free-trade.-Religious Toleration.-Maynooth.-The Queen's University.-Post-office Regulations.-The Opening of Letters.- Naturalization of Aliens.-Recall of Lord Ellenborough.-Reversal of the Vote on the Sugar Duties.-Refusal of the Crown to Sanction a Bill.-The Question of Increase in the Number of Spiritual Peers.-Repeal of the Corn-laws.-Revolution in France, and Agitation on the Continent.-Death of Sir Robert Peel.-Indifference of the Country to Reform.-Repeal of the Navigation Laws.-Resolutions in Favor of Free-trade.-The Great Exhibition of 1851.

The transactions mentioned in the last chapter were among the last events of Lord Melbourne's ministry. He had for some time been aware of his impending defeat in the House of Commons, and, greatly to his credit, had endeavored to make the return to office easier to his successors by the friendly counsels he had given to the Queen on the subject.[258] A dissolution of Parliament in the summer of 1841 only weakened his party, and in September he resigned, and was succeeded by Sir Robert Peel, who, comparatively short as was his tenure of office,[259] found it long enough to establish for himself a reputation as the greatest financier of Europe since the days of Pitt. It may be worth remarking that, in the "Memoirs of the Prince Consort," it is mentioned that in the course of his administration Peel found reason to change his judgment on the question of which House of Parliament it was the more desirable for the Prime-minister to be a member. Canning had more than once asserted his conviction that the public business would be more satisfactorily conducted when the Prime-minister was a commoner, founding his opinion chiefly on the paramount importance of financial questions, the discussion of which is almost confined to the House of Commons, and conceiving it to be supported by the history of the administration of Pitt, from whom, indeed, he had imbibed the idea; and in former years Peel had more than once expressed his concurrence with that view of the subject. But, from papers which were intrusted to him for the execution of his great work, Sir Theodore Martin learned that Peel had subsequently found reason to come to the opposite conclusion, not from any change in his view of the relative importance of the different departments of administration, but solely because "the amount of work imposed upon the first minister in the House of Commons, in addition to what he had to go through elsewhere, was too great for any human strength. In the House of Lords the Prime-minister would escape the necessity for being in a position to vindicate all the details of administration, and to answer the multiplicity of questions on all sorts of subjects, the putting of which has almost degenerated into a vice. He had, therefore, come to the conclusion that it was there he ought to be."[260] And, indeed, the subjects which demanded the care of the minister, and attracted the attention of Parliament, were constantly increasing in number, variety, and importance to the very end of his administration. Not only were the financial difficulties of the country, the depressed state of agriculture and commerce (the result of a succession of bad harvests), sufficient causes for grave anxiety, but the terrible war, of which mention has already been made, which we had now been carrying on for nearly three years in Afghanistan, and which, before the end of this very year, was about to be signalized by a disaster such as had never before befallen a British army, threatened to kindle the flames of war in Europe also, from the share which the intrigues of Russia had had in fomenting the quarrel; and the same danger was more than once in the course of the next five years imminent, from the irritation with which France regarded us, and which, commencing in Syria, while Lord Melbourne was still at the helm, lost no opportunity of displaying itself, whether in transactions in the remote Pacific Ocean or the old battle-field of the two nations, the Spanish peninsula; and finally, these embarrassing perplexities were crowned by the appalling visitation of famine, which, at the end of the fourth year of the administration, fell upon Ireland with a severity surpassing any similar event in modern history.

With all these multiform difficulties the new minister grappled with unflinching courage, and with conspicuous success. Peace was preserved abroad, and financial prosperity was restored at home. Into the details of his measures devised for this last-mentioned object, though the leading features of his administration, and those on which his fame chiefly rests, it would be beside the purpose of the present work to enter. It is sufficient to say here that, in the spirit of Pitt's great financial reform of 1787, he revised the whole of the import duties of our commercial tariff, especially reducing the duties on raw material;[261] making up the deficiency so caused by an income tax, which he described as a temporary imposition, since he doubted not that the great increase of lawful trade, which would be the consequence of the reduction of duties, would soon enable the revenue to dispense with a tax to the objections of which he was not blind. In recommending this great change to the House, he laid down as the soundest maxim of financial legislation, in which "all were now agreed, the principle that we should buy in the cheapest market and sell in the dearest," a doctrine which, when more fully carried out, as it was sure to be, led almost inevitably to the great measure for which his administration is most celebrated, the repeal of the Corn-laws. There could be no doubt that, in the most modified application of it, it struck at the root of the principle of protection, which had hitherto been the fundamental principle of our finance, and made a farther extension of it inevitable.

And, as he had been one of the leading members of the ministry which carried Catholic Emancipation, so he now proceeded on the same path of religious toleration; and, in the session of 1844, successfully recommended to the House of Commons a bill which had already been passed by the Lords, repealing a number of penal acts affecting the Roman Catholics, which, though they had long been practically obsolete, still encumbered, and it may be said disgraced, the statute book, and were, so to say, a standing degradation of and insult to the Roman Catholic body. One of them, passed in the reign of William and Mary, still forbade any Roman Catholic to come within ten miles of London, to have either sword or pistol in his house, or to possess a horse worth more than five pounds. Another, enacted under Elizabeth, still made every Roman Catholic who omitted to take certain oaths guilty of high-treason, though no attempt to administer those oaths had been made since the Revolution. Another, of the time of Charles I., deprived any Roman Catholic who should send his son to a foreign school of all protection of the law; he could neither sue nor defend an action. It may fairly be said that the credit of Parliament and of the nation was concerned in the abrogation of laws so ridiculously oppressive, and not the less obnoxious for being practically invalid. And in the same spirit another measure was framed and carried by the Lord Chancellor, whose object was the confirmation of religious endowments belonging to different sects of Protestant Dissenters, and their protection from vexatious and unjust litigation, by making a continued possession of any kind of endowment or property for twenty years a valid title.

These enactments may be regarded as indispensable supplements to the repeal of the Test Act and Catholic Emancipation. They were the coping-stone of the great edifice of religious toleration, of which the former acts had laid the foundation. And the next year Peel carried out still farther the same principle, by a measure which could not fail to be regarded as an especial boon in Ireland, since the great majority of the population of that kingdom were of the Roman Catholic persuasion. It has been seen that when the troubled state into which the Continent was thrown by the French Revolution threw hinderances in the way of the Irish students designed for the Roman Catholic priesthood going to one of the great Continental colleges, such as St. Omer or Salamanca, for their education, Pitt established for them a college at Maynooth, for the endowment of which Parliament was annually asked for a grant of about L9000. The sum had long been felt to be altogether inadequate to the requirements of the foundation. As early as the year 1807, Lord Liverpool, then Home-secretary, had contemplated a large increase of the grant, though the weakness of the government, then presided over by the Duke of Portland, prevented him from carrying out that and other measures which he had conceived in a kindred spirit. Moreover, the grant was rarely proposed without giving rise to a warm debate raised by a party whose too tender consciences forbade them to sanction any measure appearing to foster a religion from which they dissented. And to remedy the two evils (the one arising from the want of a sufficient provision, the other from the spirit of religious controversy, for which the House of Commons was certainly very ill-calculated), Peel, in 1845, proposed to treble the grant, so as to put the college on a more satisfactory footing, by providing sufficient incomes for the professors, and a revenue adequate to the respectable maintenance of an increased number of pupils; and also to place the charge for the future on the Consolidated Fund, by which step its yearly discussion in Parliament would be altogether avoided. The measure was vigorously resisted, partly on the religious ground already mentioned, and partly by an argument, urged with some plausibility, that the design with which the college had originally been founded had not been realized; that, in fact, it had not proved a benefit to the country, but rather the reverse, by tempting into the service of the Roman Catholic Church a humbler and poorer class of students than could devote themselves to it when the preliminary education involved the expense of a protracted residence in a foreign country. But the obvious advantages of the change prevailed over these considerations, and the bill was carried by large majorities.[262]

And now that the long cessation of controversy on the subject-which, indeed, has been not the least beneficial fruit of this bill of 1845-permits a candid consideration of it in all its bearings, it will probably be thought that Parliament had not often come to a wiser decision, one more dictated by judicious liberality of sentiment, and more imperatively required on every ground of statesman-like policy. If the countervailing objections and advantages be calmly weighed, it may almost be said that there was no alternative between enlarging the endowment and putting it on a new footing, or suppressing the college altogether. In its existing condition it was notoriously inadequate to fulfil the design of its founder; and any establishment visibly inadequate to its design tends to bring the design itself into some degree of contempt. Yet even if it should be granted that there might have been no fair ground of complaint if the college had never been founded, to close it after its benefits, however scanty, had been enjoyed for half a century, could not fail to have been regarded as an unpardonable injustice and injury. The other alternative, therefore, was practically the only one that remained; and in embracing it Peel was but carrying out the original principle on which the college was founded. It had been intended to be efficient; through lack of means it had proved inefficient. The obvious and just remedy was to supply such increased means as to create or bestow the efficiency originally aimed at. And it was a felicitous idea to place the charge for the future on such a footing as to combine with such an increase an avoidance of the irritation which its yearly discussion had never failed to excite.

And at the same time, to carry still farther the principle of religious toleration, or rather of religious equality, he induced the Parliament to found a new university, consisting of three colleges, one in each of the three provinces of Ulster, Munster and Connaught (Leinster, as having Trinity College and Maynooth, being regarded as already sufficiently provided with university education), which should be open to students of every religious denomination, and at which, while every kind of secular education, both literary and scientific, should be given, the stirring up of religious controversy and animosity should be guarded against, by the absence of any theological professorships. He did not, indeed, design that the still greater benefits of religious education should be withheld from the pupils, but he proposed to provide for that object by confiding their religious education to the care of the clergy of each persuasion, some of whom in each town which was the seat of a college-Belfast, Cork, and Galway-might be trusted for willingness to superintend it. It was hoped that one fruit of this scheme, and that by no means its least valuable result, would be that the association of pupils of various creeds in their studies and amusements from an early age would lead them to maintain, in their more mature years, the harmony of which the foundation had thus been laid in their youth; and that thus the religious animosities which were the principal obstacle to the prosperity of the country would be softened, and in time extinguished. And this object has been achieved to a great extent, though the disfavor with which the Roman Catholic Church regards any educational system which is not under the superintendence of its priesthood has prevented the scheme from attaining the full development which was hoped for. The number of students of each of the principal sects-the Church of Ireland, the Roman Catholics, and the Presbyterians-steadily increases.[263] Members of each religious body are among the professors in each college, and all accounts represent the most perfect harmony and cordiality as existing throughout the whole body.

Yet, important as was the principle contained in these measures, none of them, perhaps, caused such excitement at the moment as an exercise by the government of what was, in point of fact, one of its most ancient, as well as most essential, powers: the occasional opening of letters which passed through the post, in compliance with a warrant of the Secretary of State. England had at all times been the refuge of those unquiet spirits who, in pursuit of their schemes of rebellion and revolution, had incurred the displeasure of their own governments, and had too easily found accomplices here. And in the course of the summer some notorious offenders of this class found a member of the House of Commons to present a petition, in which they complained that some letters which they had posted had been stopped and opened by the officers of the Post-office. The member who presented the petition appears to have fancied it an unprecedented and wholly unlawful exercise of authority; but Sir James Graham, the Home-secretary, not only at once avowed that the statement was true, and that he had issued his warrant for the opening of the letters mentioned, but also showed that the power to issue such an order was reserved to the Secretary of State in all the statutes which regulated the proceedings of the Post-office. The clause in the act which conferred the power had been originally framed by Lord Somers, a statesman certainly as little open as any of his time to the suspicion of desiring to encroach on the rightful liberty of the subject; and it had been exercised from time to time in every reign since the Revolution. It was a power intrusted to the Secretaries of State for the public safety, and exercised by them on their own responsibility. The practice and its justification were assailed in both Houses of Parliament by members of the extreme Liberal party; but, though no distinct motion on the subject was made, the general feeling of both Houses was plainly evinced, that it was a power which might at times be highly useful for the prevention of crime, or for the hinderance of conspiracies which might be dangerous to the general welfare and tranquillity, and that the constitutional responsibility attaching to every minister for every official act was a sufficient security against its being improperly used.[264]

And it will, probably, be generally admitted that this was the statesman-like view of the subject. There is no doubt that the practice in question does infringe the great constitutional right of every individual in these kingdoms to absolute freedom of communication with his friends. But the most important and the most cherished constitutional rights must possess something of elasticity. It must be necessary at times to go back to the original object for which those rights have been conferred and secured. That original object is the safety and welfare of the whole body corporate-of the entire nation. And if that safety and welfare at times require the sacrifice, a wise ruler will not hesitate to demand it of the people, or to impose it on them for their own good. So another principle of the constitution is the absolute freedom of action for all the subjects of the sovereign; yet that principle is infringed by more than one statute: Factory Acts, which limit the hours of even voluntary labor; Education Acts, which compel the parent to a certain line of conduct toward his children; each in their way substitute another rule for that entire freedom of action which, as has been said before, is the fundamental principle of the constitution; but they make the substitution on the reasonable ground that the course of action which they compel is for the benefit, not only of the individual constrained, but of the whole community of which he is a member, and for whose welfare all laws and constitutions exist.

One of the grounds of complaint against the exercise of this power, which had been alleged by some of the opponents of the government, had been that Sir James Graham's conduct had been dictated by an unworthy subservience to some of the despotic sovereigns of the Continent. The fact was indignantly denied in the House of Lords by the Duke of Wellington; and in the course of the session a remarkable proof was afforded how little influence such motives had on the decisions of our government, when they acquiesced in the passing of a bill which was a virtual repeal of the Alien Act, which had existed for more than half a century, and of which more than one Continental sovereign would certainly have desired the retention. Of late, indeed, it had been so modified, that practically it had become little more than a dead letter; and now, in 1844, without being formally repealed, it was virtually abrogated by an act which enabled all foreigners to obtain letters of naturalization, which conferred on them every right of British subjects, except those of becoming members of Parliament,[265] or of the Privy Council.

Generally speaking, few governments had enjoyed more of the confidence of the nation than Peel's did in 1844; yet in this year it was exposed to two remarkable mortifications. The charter of the East India Company, as framed by Pitt in subsequent events, which has led to the entire extinction of the political power of the Company, makes anything beyond this brief mention of the transaction superfluous at the present time.

The other mortification of the ministry to which allusion has been made fell upon it at home in the Parliamentary discussion of the Prime-minister's financial measures, on which his judgment was usually regarded as pre-eminent, and on which a large majority of the House was generally disposed implicitly to follow his guidance. Sir Robert was not, indeed, himself Chancellor of the Exchequer, that office being filled by Mr. Goulburn, but it was certain that the Budget was inspired by a deference to the Prime-minister's views. And, among the arrangements which it proposed, one consisted of a relaxation of the sugar-duties, which was regarded with dread by those interested in the West Indies, as a farther step in the direction of free-trade, and as depriving them of the modified protection which they were as yet enjoying. To preserve that protection to them, Mr. Miles, the member for Bristol, proposed an amendment which, after an animated debate, was carried by a majority of twenty. Three months before, on the Factory Bill and the question whether the hours of labor should be limited to ten or to twelve, the minister had also found himself defeated, though by a much smaller majority; but in that case the defeat had been the less pronounced from the inconsistency of the votes on the different limits.[266] And he extricated himself from that difficulty by abandoning the bill altogether, and introducing a new one, not without angry resistance on the part of Lord John Russell and other members of the Opposition. They denounced such a manoeuvre as alike unconstitutional and unparliamentary; while he, on the contrary, insisted that the House had always jealously retained the right of reconsidering its own decisions. In that instance, however, the introduction of a new bill might have been regarded as the simplest mode of harmonizing the variety of views which had been represented by the discussion of and votes on the ministerial proposal and the amendments; but no such expedient was practicable in this case, that of the sugar-duties. A defeat on an important clause in the Budget by a majority of twenty was a far more serious matter; it was such a blow as had generally been reckoned sufficient to require a resignation of a ministry. But on this occasion Peel did not feel himself called on to take that step; nor was he inclined to dissolve Parliament, which some regarded as his only legitimate alternative, though he had little doubt that, if he did so, he should be supported by the confidence of the country. After careful reflection, the course on which he eventually decided was to adhere to the principle of a relaxation of duties, but to consent to a moderate variation from his original proposal as to the amount. And in pursuit of this plan, on the next discussion of the Budget, he proposed an amendment to that effect, making the adoption of it by the House a test of its confidence in the administration. Lord John Russell opposed the amendment with great vehemence, pronouncing the acceptance of it, if it should be accepted, and the House should thus consent "to retract its previous vote, a lamentable proof of subserviency, which would disgrace it with the country." What Sir Robert now asked was, substantially, that they should now declare that to be expedient which they had declared to be inexpedient only three nights ago; and Lord Palmerston insisted that the proper course to be taken by the government was to resign; while Mr. Labouchere, who had also been a member of Lord Melbourne's cabinet,[267] though he admitted that there might be "circumstances under which a minister might without impropriety ask the House to reconsider a vote," denied that the present was such a case, and especially denounced the importation of the question of confidence or no confidence in the ministry into the discussion as "dangerous and unconstitutional." Another section of the Opposition agreed in taking the same line; Mr. Disraeli (then beginning to lay the foundations of his reputation and influence) strongly denouncing the conduct of the minister, as degrading both to his own supporters and still more to the whole House, and recommending him to say frankly to both, "We have gauged your independence, and you may have a semblance of parliamentary freedom as far as this point, but the moment you go farther, you must either submit to public disgrace, or we must submit to private life." The end of the discussion was, that the minister prevailed by a majority a trifle larger than that which had defeated him before. This is not the place to discuss the difference between one principle of taxation and another; but the question whether a minister when defeated is justified in asking either House of Parliament to reconsider its vote, seems one that could only have been raised in a House under the influence of unusual excitement of some kind. The charge that such a request was unconstitutional only serves to show how loosely the words "constitution" and "unconstitutional" are often used even by those from whom precision of language might most be expected; for Sir Robert Peel's proposal that the House should retract its vote was not unprecedented, the very same demand having been made in 1833 by Lord Althorp, then Chancellor of the Exchequer of Lord Grey's ministry, of which those very men were members who were now loudest in denouncing the conduct of the present government. And on that occasion it is worth remarking that, though Lord Althorp's demand was resisted in one or two quarters, he was vigorously supported by Sir Robert Peel, on the ground that, though to rescind one night a vote passed on a former one might be not altogether free from objection, it would be a far greater evil that questions of importance should be held to be in all cases finally decided by a single vote, passed, it might be, in a thin House, or in obedience to some sudden impulse.

And this seems to be the view of the case commended not only by constitutional and parliamentary practice, but by common-sense. It would be strange, indeed, when the questions submitted to the British Parliament and the decisions of that Parliament on them are so often of paramount importance to the whole world, if the Parliament should be the only body in the world denied the right of revising its own judgments, the only one whose first resolution is so irrevocable that even itself may not change or modify it. To rescind a recent vote is, no doubt, as Sir Robert Peel said, a step not wholly free from objection. It should be an exceptional act, as one which, if often repeated, would give an appearance of capricious fickleness and instability to the opinions of Parliament, calculated to impair that respect for it which the whole state and nation are deeply concerned in upholding; but to refuse, under any circumstances, to confess a change of judgment, would lay the Parliament open to an imputation at least equally dangerous to that respect-that of an obstinacy which refuses to confess the possibility of being mistaken, or to hear reason. It would not be well, therefore, that the abrogation of a previous vote should become an ordinary practice; but it would be equally undesirable that any fixed or unchangeable rule should be interposed to prevent a second discussion of an important question, with the possibility of its leading to a reversal of the opinion first expressed.

In the same year (1844) the ministers felt compelled to raise a constitutional point of singular refinement, which had the effect of arresting the progress of a bill, in which one part of the kingdom took a lively interest, which a division in its favor proved to be fully shared by the House of Lords.[268] It has been already mentioned that in the last year of the preceding reign a bill had passed for creating, when opportunity offered by the sees affected becoming vacant, two new bishoprics at Ripon and Manchester, the incomes of which were to be provided by the union of some of the smaller existing bishoprics, Gloucester with Bristol, St. Asaph with Bangor. But the Welsh regarded with great disapproval any reduction of the number of bishoprics in the principality, and Lord Powis now brought in a bill to repeal so much of the act as provided for the union of two Welsh sees, urging not only their great extent, which he stated at 3000 square miles of very mountainous country, but the fact that the population of North Wales was steadily and largely increasing. The bill, as has been intimated, was favorably received by the Lords, who passed the second reading by a majority of twelve; but, before it could be read a third time, the Duke of Wellington, as leader of the ministry in that House, announced that the bill was one which touched the prerogative of the crown, and therefore could not be proceeded with without the consent of her Majesty, which he was not authorized to express.

As the matter was explained by the Chancellor, Lord Lyndhurst, the manner in which the bill touched the royal prerogative was this: as, during the vacancy of any see, its temporalities belonged to the crown, any alterations in a see affected the direct pecuniary interests of the crown, and he, as Speaker of the House, doubted whether he should be justified in putting a question which so touched the royal prerogative without the sovereign's consent. A committee which was appointed to investigate the case fully confirmed the view thus taken by the ministers, and the bill was dropped.

It was, however, an exercise of the royal prerogative which was received by the House in general with great dissatisfaction. Certainly, since the Civil List and royal income had been placed on their present footing, it was only by a very forced construction that the pecuniary interests of the sovereign could be said to be affected. And it seemed a very insufficient plea for evoking the exercise of a power which, as it was said, had certainly never been exerted before since the accession of the Hanoverian dynasty. Nor was it made more acceptable by the explanation of Lord Brougham, who on this occasion came to the support of the minister, that the refusal of the crown's consent at this stage was "a warning, as it were, a polite and courteous communication between the sovereign, as guardian of the privileges of the crown, and the two Houses of Parliament, that if they passed a certain bill it would not receive the royal assent;" for, though the right to refuse the royal assent to any bill was incontestable, it had not been exercised since the time of William III., and to put it in force for the protection of an imaginary interest of the crown itself would have been so unpopular an exercise of it that no administration could have ventured to advise it.

One of the arguments which the Duke of Wellington brought forward in the discussion, and which, probably, contributed to induce him thus to strangle Lord Powis's bill, has had an influence on subsequent legislation. He urged that its adoption-since the resolution to establish bishoprics at Manchester and Ripon was one which every one desired to carry out-would increase the number of bishops, "and thus make an organic change in the constitution of the House of Lords." It is not very clear how the addition of a single spiritual peer could have that effect. But the Duke had dwelt upon the same argument before in the debate on the proposed union of the sees affected, urging that there was such a jealousy of the Church in many quarters, and especially in some of the large towns, that it would be very undesirable to pass any measure the effect of which would be to increase the number of Episcopal peers. Even if there was any general reluctance at that time to see such an increase (a fact which was by no means ascertained), it may be doubted whether it was founded on any sufficient reason. It is not easy to see why, when there is no limit to the augmentation of the number of lay peers, it should be judged impolitic or unjust to make even so small an addition to the number of spiritual peers. At the Restoration the spiritual peers were, probably, more than a fifth of the entire House. From the great number of subsequent creations of lay peers they were now less than a sixteenth, so that there could be no ground for apprehending that a slight re-enforcement of the Episcopal bench would disturb the balance, or give the Church an undue preponderating weight in the decisions of the House. The difficulty, however, such as it appeared to the Duke then, has had such weight with subsequent administrations, that a new principle has been established of creating bishoprics which shall not at first confer seats in the Upper House till their holders become entitled to them by seniority. As they are peers from the moment of their consecration, it may be doubted whether this creation of peers, without seats in Parliament, does not deserve the name of "an organic change in the constitution," far more than the addition of one or two ecclesiastical peers to the Episcopal bench; and also whether it has not established a dangerous principle and precedent; the disconnection of bishoprics from seats in Parliament, in even a single instance, seeming to furnish an argument in favor of the exclusion of the whole order, a measure which, if unjust and injurious to the Church, would be at least equally injurious to Parliament itself, and to the whole state.

But all questions of this kind were presently lost sight of in the excitement produced by the measure which more than any other has stamped Sir Robert Peel's administration with a lasting character, the repeal of the Corn-laws. Many statesmen, even of those who were most in favor of free-trade in other articles of commerce, made an exception in the case of corn, partly from a feeling of the necessity of encouraging agriculture, and partly from a conviction of the danger of in any way contributing to create or increase a dependence on foreign countries for the food of the people. Both Whigs and Tories were generally thus agreed on the necessity of maintaining the principle of protection; the dispute between the two parties being whether it were best achieved by a fixed duty on imported corn, or by what was commonly known as a sliding scale: a scale, that is, which varied inversely with the price of the grain itself, rising as the price in the home market fell, and falling as it rose. In the manufacturing districts a different feeling had prevailed for some years. In the first years of the present reign severe distress in Manchester and others of the chief manufacturing towns had led to the formation of an association whose chief object was sufficiently indicated by its title of the Anti-Corn-law League. At first Mr. Villiers, the member for Wolverhampton, was its principal spokesman in the House of Commons, but at subsequent elections two manufacturers of great eloquence obtained seats, and year after year urged the entire repeal of all duties on corn with great earnestness, though for some time their arguments made but little impression on the House. Their motions were rejected in 1842 by a majority of 300; in 1843 by one exceeding 250; in 1844 by above 200; and in 1845 by one of more than 130 in a much smaller House. But this last division had scarcely been taken when an unprecedented calamity-the almost entire failure of the potato crop, which was attacked in nearly every part of both islands by a new disease, the cause of which is not to this day fully ascertained- suddenly changed the aspect of the subject. To the English farmer and laborer it was a severe loss; to the Irish farmer it was ruin; to the Irish peasant famine. The grain harvest, too, was generally deficient. And it was evident that rigorous measures, promptly taken, were indispensable, if a large portion of the peasantry in the southern and western provinces of Ireland were not to be left to perish of actual starvation. In the face of so terrible an emergency Peel acted with great decision. On his own responsibility he authorized the purchase of a large supply of Indian corn from the United States, hoping, among other indirect effects of such a step, to accustom the Irish to the use of other kinds of food besides the root on which hitherto they had too exclusively relied.[269] And he laid before his colleagues in the cabinet a proposal to suspend the existing Corn-law "for a limited period," a measure which all saw must lead to its eventual repeal. It would be superfluous now to recapitulate the discussions which took place, the various alternative proposals which were suggested, or the dissensions in the cabinet to which his proposal gave birth; the resignation of the ministry, and its subsequent resumption of office, when Lord Stanley and Lord John Russell had found it impossible to form an administration. It is sufficient to say that, as soon as Parliament met, Sir Robert brought forward a bill to reduce the duty on corn to four shillings, a price only half of the lowest fixed duty that had ever been proposed before, that reduction, too, being a stepping-stone to the abolition of all duties, at the end of three years, beyond a shilling a quarter, which was to be retained, in order to acquire an accurate knowledge of the quantity of grain imported. The diminution, however, of this duty was not the whole object of his new measure. It included other arrangements which would serve as a compensation to the agriculturists, by relieving them from some of the peculiar burdens to which the land was subjected; and it contained, farther, a reduction or abolition of import duties hitherto levied on many other articles, especially on such as "formed the clothing of the country," on the fair ground that if the removal of protection from the agriculturist were "a sacrifice for the common good," the commercial and manufacturing interests might justly be required to make a similar sacrifice for the same patriotic object.

Though opposed in both Houses with unusual bitterness, the ministry carried their measure, which, indeed, in all probability, even if the destruction of the potato crop had not come to accelerate the movement, could not have been long delayed, the continual and rapid increase of the population adding yearly strength to the arguments of those who denounced the imposition of any tax which had the effect of increasing the price of the people's food. But, however inevitable it may have been, we are not the less compelled to regard it as indirectly bringing about a great constitutional change, or rather as consummating that which had been commenced by the Reform Bill. Till the year 1832 the territorial aristocracy had exerted a predominating influence in the government of the state. The Reform Bill, which deprived the wealthier land-owners of the greater part of their power at elections, struck the first blow at that influence. The abolition of the Corn-laws inflicted on it a still more decisive wound, by its extinction of the doctrine that there was any such peculiar sacredness about the land and its produce as entitled them to protection beyond that enjoyed by other kinds of property. Placing in that respect the commercial and manufacturing interest on a level with the landed interest, it made us, in a farther and a somewhat different sense from that in which Napoleon had used the phrase, a nation of shopkeepers.[270]

The repeal of the Corn-laws had another result: it divided the Conservative party, and, as a necessary consequence, led to the downfall of the ministry. The same session which witnessed its success in carrying that repeal witnessed also its defeat on a coercion bill, which they regarded as indispensable for the "protection of life in Ireland," where actual murders had reached the appalling amount of nearly three hundred in two years. The ministry at once resigned, and Lord John Russell had no difficulty in forming an administration, now that the question of the Corn-laws was finally settled. It was, however, no bed of roses to which the new ministry succeeded; the famine in Ireland exceeded the worst anticipations; and, though prodigious efforts were made by the government and Parliament to relieve it, though large sums were placed at the disposal of the Lord-lieutenant, aided by contributions from private sources in England to an enormous amount; though the small remnant of the import duty on corn which had been left on it by the measure of the preceding year was taken off, and the navigation laws suspended, in order that no obstacle interposed to the acquisition of food from every available quarter, it was estimated that more than half a million of people perished through actual famine or the diseases which scarcity brought in its train.[271] A severe monetary crisis was one not unnatural result of this distress, so severe that the Funds fell to a price below any that had been quoted for many years, and the reserve in the Bank of England to an amount lower than it had been at any period since 1828. And these difficulties had hardly been surmounted when a new revolution in France overturned the dynasty of Louis Philippe and established a republic. The revolutionary contagion spread to Italy, where, indeed, the movement had begun. The Pope-Pius IX.-who had but lately succeeded to the tiara, was forced to flee from Rome in the disguise of a foreign courier, after his Prime-minister had been murdered by the mob. Germany was scarcely less disturbed. The administration of Metternich, who had governed Austria with authority little less than absolute for nearly forty years, was overthrown in a tumult in which he himself escaped with difficulty from the violence of the populace; dangerous riots took place at Munich, at Berlin, and at the capitals of most of the smaller principalities, and for some time everything seemed to portend the outbreak of a general war, likely to be the more formidable as being a war of the revolutionary and republican against the monarchical principle. Happily, that danger was averted. The only war which broke out between different nations was a brief contest in the north of Italy, which the superior numbers of the Austrian armies and the skill of Marshal Radetsky, a veteran who had learned the art of war under Suvarof nearly sixty years before, decided in favor of Austria, and which in the spring of 1849 was terminated by a peace on less unfavorable terms to Sardinia than she could well have expected. And in the same season tranquillity was re-established even at Rome, which, from the peculiar character of the Papal power, contained special elements of provocation and danger.

But, though peace was thus generally maintained, these various events had produced a ferment of spirits which required some time to calm down, and so greatly embarrassed the government, that in the spring of 1852 Lord John Russell's administration was dissolved, and a new ministry was formed by Lord Derby[272]. But the causes which had overthrown his predecessor remained to weaken him; so that for some time it seemed impossible to form a ministry which afforded any promise of stability. Such a rapid succession of changes as ensued had had no parallel since the first years of George III. Between February, 1852, and February, 1855, the country had no fewer than four different Prime-ministers, a fact which was at once both the proof and the parent of weakness in every administration. Lord John Russell had attempted to procure a factitious support in the country by stimulating a fresh demand for parliamentary reform. A year or two before, he had provoked the dissatisfaction of the "Advanced Liberals," as they called themselves, by insisting on the finality of the Reform Bill of 1832, and by advising his followers "to rest and be thankful" for what had been then obtained. But now he began to advance an opinion that that act required "some amendments to carry into more complete effect the principles on which it was founded." He inserted an intimation of that doctrine in the Queen's speech; and endeavored to give effect to it by bringing in a bill to lower the franchise, having, it seems, persuaded himself that a five-pound franchise would create a more Conservative class of voters.[273] He had scarcely introduced it when the fall of his ministry led to its abandonment; but, though it was coldly received by the House of Commons, the idea was taken up by the other political parties, who can hardly be acquitted of having used the question merely as an instrument of party warfare, trying, with an unstatesmanlike indifference to the danger of re-awakening the old frenzy on the subject, to rouse the nation to take an interest in it; but trying in vain. The nation was no longer in the same temper as it had displayed twenty years before. The Reform Bill of 1832 had been demanded and carried with a frantic vehemence of enthusiasm such as could only have been excited by real defects and grievances. But those grievances had been removed and redressed. And the bulk of the people could take no interest in schemes whose sole end seemed to be either to satisfy the theories of some political doctrinaires or to embarrass an adversary; till at last, as Reform Bill after Reform Bill was framed, brought in, and defeated, or dropped, it became plain, "as the Prince Consort noted in a private memorandum at the end of 1859, that what the country wanted, in fact, was not reform, but a bill to stop the question of Reform."[274] And, at last, the prevalence of this feeling Lord John Russell could not conceal even from himself, but confessed to Lord Palmerston, then Prime-minister, who had always silently discouraged the movement, that "the apathy of the country was undeniable; nor was it a transient humor. It seemed rather a confirmed habit of mind. Four Reform Bills had been introduced of late years by four different governments, and for not one of them had there been the least enthusiasm. The conclusion to which he had come was, that the advisers of the crown of all parties having offered to the country various measures of reform, and the country having shown itself indifferent to them all, the best course which could now be taken was to wait till the country should show a manifest desire for an amendment of the representation."[275]

There was, however, in these years one subject in which the country did take a real interest; that was the development and extension of the principles of free-trade. On that the national view had become so decided that in 1848 the Parliament even abolished the navigation laws, which had subsisted so long, the first act on the subject dating from the reign of Richard II., that the adherence to the principle contained in them of confining both the export and the import trade of the kingdom, with but few exceptions, to British shipping, seemed almost an essential article of the constitution. It was the dearer, too, to the national prejudices, from the sense universally entertained of the paramount importance of maintaining the pre-eminence of our navy, and from the belief that the commercial marine was a nursery for the royal fleets, with which they could not dispense. But latterly the laws had become unpopular even with some of those who had formerly been supposed to derive the greatest benefit from them. Many of our colonies had complained of their operation, and several of the ablest of our colonial governors had recommended their repeal. They had been found, too, to present frequent and considerable difficulties in our commercial negotiations with other countries, and many naval officers of large experience and sound judgment expressed a decided belief that they were of no practical use to the naval service. The result of a long and able debate was that the laws were repealed, with the exception of that portion of them which preserved the monopoly of the coasting trade to our own seamen and vessels, that exception being chiefly dictated by considerations connected with the prevention of smuggling.

The ground on which the ministers relied in proposing this repeal of laws so ancient was that, when protection had been removed from every other trade, those concerned in these different trades had an irresistible claim for its removal from the shipping. And on general principles, both of commerce and statesmanship, the claim was, as they urged, irresistible, unless some object of greater importance still than uniformity of legislation-namely, the national safety, bound up as it unquestionably was in the perpetual pre-eminence of the national navy-required an exception to be made. But for the maintenance of our maritime supremacy it was, as Burke had preached three-quarters of a century before, better to trust to the spirit of the people, to their attachment to their government, and to their innate aptitude for seamanship, which they seem to have inherited from the hardy rovers of the dark ages, and which no other nation shares with them in an equal degree. And if that may safely be trusted, as undoubtedly it may, to maintain the supremacy of our warlike fleets, the preponderance of argument seemed greatly on the side of those who contended that our commercial fleets needed no such protection; to which it may be added that exceptions to a general rule and principle are in themselves so questionable, that the burden of proof seems to lie upon those who would establish or maintain them. But the advocates of free-trade were not content even with this triumph, though it might have been thought a crowning one, and in the course of the next year they succeeded in carrying a resolution which (though Lord Derby and the opponents of the act of 1846 were now in office) was not resisted even by the ministry, being, in fact, the result of a compromise between the different parties; and which asserted that "the improved condition of the country, and especially of the industrious classes, was mainly the result of recent legislation, which had established the principle of unrestricted competition, ... and that it was the opinion of the House that this policy, firmly maintained and prudently extended, would, without inflicting injury on any important interest, best enable the industry of the country to bear its own burdens, and would thereby most surely promote the welfare and contentment of the people." Such a resolution was, in fact, the adoption of free-trade as the permanent ruling principle of all future commercial legislation. And even before the adoption of this resolution, the feeling in favor of free-trade had been greatly strengthened by the Great Exhibition, which not only delighted the world for six months with a spectacle of such varied and surpassing beauty as even its original projector, the Prince Consort, had not pictured to himself, but which had also the farther and more important effect of instructing the British workman in every branch of manufacture, by bringing before his eyes the workmanship of other nations; and, as we may well believe (though such a result is not so easily tested), of improving the mutual good-will between rival nations, from the respect for each which the experience of their skill and usefulness could not fail to excite.

Notes:

[Footnote 258: On the 20th of February, 1840, Baron Stockmar writes: "Melbourne told me that he had already expressed his opinion to the Prince that the Court ought to take advantage of the present movement to treat all parties, especially the Tories, in the spirit of a general amnesty." To the Queen his language was the same: "You should now hold out the olive-branch a little."-Life of the Prince Consort, i., 83.]

[Footnote 259: He became Prime-minister in September, 1841, and retired in June, 1846-four years and three-quarters afterward.]

[Footnote 260: "Life of the Prince Consort," i., 266. It may be remarked that, in spite of the opinion thus expressed by Sir Robert Peel, of those who, since his retirement in 1846, have held the same office, the majority have been members of the House of Commons. The peers who have since been Prime-ministers have been Lord Aberdeen and Lord Derby; the members of the House of Commons have been Lord John Russell, Lord Palmerston, Mr. Disraeli, and Mr. Gladstone; though it may be thought that in his second ministry Mr. Disraeli showed his concurrence in Sir Robert Peel's latest view, by becoming a peer in the third year of his administration.]

[Footnote 261: Lord Stanhope tells us "the remedial resolutions moved by Pitt in the House of Commons, as abolishing the old duties and substituting new ones in a simpler form, amounted in number to no less than 2537."-Life of Pitt, i., 330. Peel, in his speech, March 21, 1842, states that he reduces or takes off altogether (wherever the duty is trifling, but is practicable) the duty on 750 articles of import.]

[Footnote 262: In the Commons by 307 to 184; in the Lords by 226 to 69.]

[Footnote 263: The following statements of the members of colleges and of the three denominations for 1879, 1874, and 1869 appear in the last Queen's University Calendar:

1879. 1874. 1869. Church of Ireland ....... 201 189 211 Roman Catholics ....... 223 188 161 Presbyterians .......... 388 249 227 Other denominations...... 88 87 83

-- -- --

900 713 682]

[Footnote 264: In the course of the session, in order to tranquillize the public mind on the subject, secret committees were appointed by both Houses of Parliament to investigate the subject, from whose inquiries it appeared that, since the days when the government was endangered by the plots of the Jacobites, the power had been very sparingly used. The most conspicuous instance of its employment had been in the case of Bishop Atterbury, several of whose letters had been opened, and were produced in Parliament to justify the bill of "pains and penalties" which was passed against him. The power had been confined to Great Britain till the latter part of the last century, when it was judged desirable to extend it also to the Lord-lieutenant of Ireland. But, since the Peace of Amiens, the number of letters opened in a year had not, on an average, exceeded eight; nor was there the least ground for suspecting that a single one had been opened except on such information as fully warranted suspicion.

The practice, however, was not confined to our own government. In the second volume of the "Life of Bishop Wilberforce" a page is given of his diary, dated July 18, 1854, which records a conversation in which the Duke of Newcastle and Lord John Russell took part, and in which it is mentioned that the French government, under the administration of M. Guizot, opened letters, and that the practice was not confined to monarchical or absolute governments, for "the American government opens most freely all letters." And, with reference to this particular case, the Duke of Newcastle said that "Sir James Graham really opened Mazzini's letters on information which led to a belief that a great act of violence and bloodshed might be prevented by it."-Life of Bishop Wilberforce, ii., 247.]

[Footnote 265: A subsequent act, passed since the date at which the present history closes, has repealed even this exception. By the 33d Victoria, c. 14 ("Law Reports," p. 169), it is enacted that "an alien, to whom a certificate of naturalization is granted, shall in the United Kingdom be entitled to all political and other rights, powers, and privileges, and be subject to all obligations to which a natural born British subject is entitled as subject in the United Kingdom," etc.; and at the general election of 1880 the Baron de Ferrieres, a Belgian nobleman, who had been naturalized in 1867, was elected M.P. for Cheltenham.]

[Footnote 266: In one instance-on the question whether twelve should be the number of hours, as proposed by the Government-the majority against that number was 186 to 183. But immediately afterward a majority of 188 to 184 decided against Lord Ashley's alternative proposal of ten hours.]

[Footnote 267: As President of the Board of Trade. He afterward was raised to the Peerage as Lord Taunton.]

[Footnote 268: The second reading was carried in the House of Lords by 49 to 37.]

[Footnote 269: See "Peel's Memoirs," ii., 173.]

[Footnote 270: It has been observed that till the Corn-laws were repealed there had been no instance whatever of any person who had been engaged in trade becoming a cabinet minister. Since that time there have been several, some of whom only relinquished their share in houses of business on receiving their appointments, and some who are generally understood to have continued to participate in the profits of trade while members of an administration.]

[Footnote 271: Alison, quoting the General Report of the Census Commissioners, estimates the deaths caused by famine and the diseases engendered by it at the appalling number of 590,000, and states the sums advanced under different acts of Parliament to meet the emergency at L7,132,268.-History of Europe, vii., 274, 276, 2d series.]

[Footnote 272: The same statesman who has previously been mentioned as Lord Stanley, and whom the death of his father had recently raised to the House of Peers.]

[Footnote 273: In 1853 he said to Lord Clarendon, speaking of a new bill which he was pressing on Lord Aberdeen, then Prime-minister, "I am for making it as Conservative as possible, and that by a large extension of the suffrage. The Radicals are the ten-pound holders. The five-pound holders will be Conservative, as they are more easily acted upon."-Life of the Prince Consort, ii., 503. It was the same idea that inspired some of the details of the Reform Bill subsequently passed by Lord Derby's third ministry.]

[Footnote 274: "Life of the Prince Consort," iv., 395.]

[Footnote 275: "Life of the Prince Consort," v., 56.]