"WHERE are we?" "What are we?" Such were the natural exclamations of the broken and routed Conservative party,-"scattered and peeled," sold by their leaders into the hands of their enemies at the break up of the late administration. "Who is to lead us?" "What is to be our rallying point? These were the questions which were asked by some with accents of despondency; by others with the recklessness of despair. Doubtless, the occasion was one which might well test the firmness of the staunchest champions of social order. The guide proved a traitor. The man entrusted with power for the purpose of accomplishing the objects of a great party, used it for diametrically opposite objects. The faction over which they had enabled him to triumph, and which were before him as dead men, are again resuscitated into life.

A

fiercer energy possesses the assailants
of the institutions which give its dis-
tinctive character to the British mo-
narchy, and a glow of triumph ani-
mates their hearts as they contem-
plate their weakened defences, and the
slackened vigour and the divided coun-
sels of those by whom they are main-
tained. A revolution ministry is again
in power.
The crown, the church, the
hereditary peerage are again at the
mercy of men whose necessities, if not
their will, must compel them to look
more to the faction by whom they are
sustained, than to the interests which
they are bound to uphold; and who
cannot subsist a moment longer than
they continue to be blind leaders of
the blind, and conduct the onward
movement to which they are indebted
for existence. Is it any wonder that
such a state of things should strike the
stoutest heart with dismay; and that
the Conservative party, lately so trium-
phant, but now broken and dispirited,
should, in their exasperation at treach-
ery, their confusion in defeat, and their
indignant astonishment at the total
abandonment of principle on the part
of those whom they most trusted, feel
distrustful of their position, and even
doubtful of their identity.

Let us calmly review the leading
VOL. XXVIII.—No. 164.

circumstances by which this strange reversal has been brought about, of an order of things which promised to secure us against the further inroads of revolution. In 1841, upon a dissolution of parliament by the Whigs, and against all the government influence, the Conservative party became ascendant, and could count upon a clear majority of more than ninety members. The deplorable financial policy of the outgoing ministers had embarrassed trade, and given a check to public confidence; and their successors, who found an exhausted exchequer and an increasing debt, entered upon the toils of office with every hope of being sustained by public opinion, if only they boldly grappled with the difficulties by which they were confronted, and made an honest effort for the salvation of the empire.

It is to be observed, that the discredit into which the Whigs had fallen, arose not merely from their financial blunders, but from the minatory aspect which they assumed towards the institutions of the country. By their reckless educational projects, the moral feelings and the religious convictions of vast numbers were revolted. By their alliance with O'Connell, and their dependence upon his faction for support, deep suspicions were entertained, that they were either bent upon, or would be compelled to, the abandonment of the Protestant Church in Ireland. No confidence was placed in them for any principled attachment to the Establishment in either country. Their leanings were towards every variety of dissent, rather than that settled form of sound words which constitutes our reasonable service; and their patronage and their influence Iwas directed with a view to the multiplication of their political partizans, rather than the maintenance of the faith as it is set forth in the Articles and the Liturgy of the Church of England. Hence, the deep distrust with which they were regarded by the soberminded and the well-informed members of our Establishment; and, we may add, the aversion of many honest

R

Dissenters from that Establishment, who felt satisfied with the perfect toleration which was secured to them, and desired not to see it overthrown.

over

If religious men were offended, and the commercial classes alarmed, the great agricultural body was not without its fears, that by the abandonment of a protective policy, their prosperity would be endangered. It was, therefore, by a combination of all these threatened interests that the O'Connell-Melbourne ministry was thrown, and Sir Robert Peel elevated to the premiership of England. The feelings and principles which led to his exaltation, indicate the policy which he was expected to pursue. The finances were to be retrieved relief was to be afforded to the commercial and the working classes-and something was to be done which would stay the progress of infidelity and latitudinarianism, and guarantee the stability of the moral and religious institutions.

As a finance minister, Sir Robert fulfilled the public expectations. The confidence reposed in him enabled him to impose an income tax upon the country, which has sufficed amply for the retrieval of the public credit; while such reductions have been made in many articles of extensive consumption as bring them within the reach of the humbler classes, whose comforts are thus multiplied, and whose condition is improved. All that is very well. But how stands the case as to the other two great interests? Let the Charitable Bequests' bill, the Maynooth bill, and the National Education system-by all of which Protestantism has been discouraged, and Popery aggrandized in Ireland-answer the question with respect to the one; and with respect to the other, we have only to point to the sweeping abolition of the corn laws, by which our protective policy has been abandoned.

Thus, we have financial dexterity, the only set-off against a course of policy which threatens more violent changes in our moral and social condition than ever were contemplated by the Whigs, when, for a bare suspicion of such designs, they were driven from power by the almost universal feeling of an indignant empire.

Sir Robert, therefore, has failed in satisfying the reasonable desires of the

powerful party by whom he was placed in office, upon two most important subjects, respecting which they felt an intense solicitude the protection of the agricultural interest, and the maintenance of those Protestant principles which would be our best guarantee against Romish encroachment.

He began by his pro-Popery measures. Romanism in Ireland was to be taken under the protection of the state. The Maynooth grant, which, even in its original shape, was viewed with grave disapprobation by a large and an increasing number of men, was greatly enlarged. The dignities of the Romish hierarchy were recognized; and it was manifest to all men that provision was rapidly being made for the permanent and legislative establishment of Popery in Ireland.

The shock which was thus given to Protestant feeling and principle, caused the first split in the Conservative party. Ireland thus became, indeed, a difficulty, but a difficulty of the late premier's own making. He thus alienated many of his most influential supporters; and while England, from one end to the other, was aroused into an indignant reprehension of measures which were a great boon to seditious agitation, while they fostered superstition, such a secession took place from the party of the minister, as must leave him, on critical occasions, dependent upon political opponents for support, and liable, at any moment, to be driven from office by a combination which could not be resisted.

Such was the condition to which he reduced himself by his new mode of dealing with the difficulties of Ireland. His party in parliament rent in twain; and out of parliament, almost all parties, forgetting their differences for the purpose of giving expression to the deep feelings of horror, astonishment, and scorn, with which they regarded this audacious attempt to resuscitate Popery, and to raise it to the rank of one of the great governing powers of the empire! Let only the measures be completed, which must have been contemplated by Sir Robert Peel, and of which the Maynooth bill and the Charitable Bequests bill were the initiative, and Ireland would thenceforth be handed over to a fac

tion, which would never rest until a legislative separation from Great Britain was accomplished, which must end in the dismemberment of the empire.

From that moment Sir Robert felt that his tenure of office was precarious, and that his ministry must speedily come to an end. We do not allude to this subject now for any other purpose than that of showing the probable causes which led to the sudden and sweeping adoption of the free trade policy, to which he is thought to have sacrificed his political existence. In

our judgment, he did no such thing. We do not say that if he had had a prospect of a long continuance in office, he would not have ultimately, though gradually, developed those views to which he would appear to have been so suddenly converted. That would be but following out the principles to which he had already given in his adhesion; and we have no doubt that, not rashness and precipitancy, but a most guarded caution, would have marked their development as they were suffered to appear; so that they would seem like growths, rather than creations; and surprise less by their magnitude, than gratify by the favourable results which might be confidently anticipated from their adoption.

Such, we have no doubt, was the course upon which he had resolved, and which, had he felt confident of a secure possession of power, he would have pursued. But the crisis was precipitated by his Maynooth measures, which he felt must prove the death of his administration. Any diversion was desirable which would turn the public eye from that plague spot in his government; and it would not be the less acceptable, because it would visit his contumacious partizans with the punishment which their refractory opposition to him deserved. Hence, Sir Robert Peel's wholesale and sudden adoption of the entire of Mr. Cobden's policy respecting the importation of foreign corn. Of that, we have his own words that he foresaw the inevitable result, as far as he was himself concerned. He entered upon his new measures like a doomed man. He knew that the Conservative party must be broken up by them, and that his fall, as a minister, could

not be distant, But he knew also that, in any event, it was near at hand; and his sacrifice of power, of which there has been so much vaunting, and which has been so repeatedly referred to as a proof of his sublime regard for principle, amounted to nothing more than this, that he preferred going out as the destroyer than as the destroyed; that he preferred going out upon the ruin of the great party by whom he had heen elevated to power, than as the rejected of that party by whom his panacea for the wants and woes of Ireland had been, as he deemed, so intemperately resented. That was

the choice. He had no other. He must either be content to perish piecemeal upon the Maynooth rock, upon which his vessel had struck, or get up such a storm as might agitate the ocean so as to lift it, but only to be swallowed by the yawning abyss which lay beyond. So that whatever, for good or for evil, the new measures of commercial policy may, in the long run, produce, the country will owe to the desperate effort of the right honourable baronet to escape from one difficulty by plunging into another; choosing rather to perish at once with the eclat of commercial liberality, than to expire gradually, of sheer inanition, from the desertion of his natural supporters.

Such, in our humble judgment, is the best explanation which can be given of Sir Robert Peel's sudden conversion to the free trade doctrines of Messrs. Cobden and Co. The reader will observe that the phenomenon to be accounted for, is not that the balance of the right honourable baronet's judgment should have inclined towards the theories of commercial freedom; but that he should have all at once regarded them as not only indisputably true in the abstract, but that their practical adoption was so pressingly important, as to require that they should be immediately recognized by law, although the entire destruction of the great Conservative party, which it had cost ten years to reconstruct, must be the immediate consequence. The potato panic in Ireland! Does any man believe that he was moved by a consideration such as that to make a sweeping and radical change in the whole commercial policy of the empire, and that at the