time so urgent, that it was a matter of imperious duty not only to strike a blow against the agricultural interest, by which their prosperity must be overthrown, but to destroy the party on whom alone reliance could be placed for the preservation of our monarchical institutions; or, did not the measure admit of delay, by which we might have been enabled to feel our way in the direction of a removal of restrictions upon the import of food; and be gradually let in upon reluctant Conservatives, as they were able to bear it? To our minds nothing has been said, or pretended, which could convince us that this latter alternative was not practicable, and that Sir Robert, supposing him to be sincerely bent upon the one object alone, might not have accomplished it, or put it in the way of being in due time accomplished, without that second treachery to his party, by whom he had been forgiven and again adopted, which left them no alternative but ignominious submission to him as a dictator, or his utter rejection as a leader thenceforth, and for ever.

Nor are we sure that temper had not something to do with this second dereliction of principle, by which every one was taken by surprise, and his Conservative followers dismayed and confounded. He had intended to steal a march upon the recusants by such stealthy concessions, from time to time, to the Romanists, as might pave the way for the exaltation of Popery, and render its final establishment plain and easy. And, to a certain extent, he had succeeded. The education of the country had been thrown into their hands. The Bill for regulating charitable bequests, and giving them their titles and their precedence, had advanced to the very verge of recognition as an establishment; and he little thought that the enlarged grant to Maynooth, which would have brought them within an easy stage of paying the Romish priests out of the treasury, would have roused the commotion it did amongst his followers, or so imminently perilled his administration. But so it was. The sincere Protestants of his party took the alarm. Their eyes were at once opened to the dangers by which they were menaced. Their opposition was strenuous and indignant. The Premier persevered. He over. ruled them with a high hand; and, as in the case of Emancipation, casting

off his friends, he carried his measure by the aid of his enemies. This was not to be borne. A large number of the best men of his party, feeling themselves thus driven below the gangway, left him; and the remainder were barely sufficient to furnish a measuring cast majority, by which he must live, as a minister, from hand to mouth, liable at any moment to be outvoted, and not certain, for a single day, of his ministerial existence.

It was not until the opposition of these men was settled, and became, to use the phrase, chronic, that Sir Robert Peel declared his conversion to the total repeal of the corn laws; thereby, whatever might become of himself as a minister, rendering it impossible for them to form an administration. If this rendered his tenure of office precarious, he thus rendered their aspirations after it fruitless, and their attainment of it impossible. He had now undisguisedly passed over to the enemy, and openly declared (a declaration which he repeated only a short time before his death) that the Roman Catholics "should never find in him anything but a friend.”

How far he was moved by temper (for with all his blandness he was not without a portion of gall for his friends), how far he was influenced by judgment, in the strange and startling course which he now pursued, we pretend not to say. Possibly both were not without their effect upon him; and while he felt no grief at the punishment thus inflicted upon those who so keenly and bitterly resented his patronage of Popery, he had large and generous views of the advantage which the repeal of the corn laws would confer upon the empire. Take it how we may, his conduct was passing strange, and may well cause the thoughtful man to exclaim, with the meditative author of the "Night Thoughts"—

"How rich, how poor, how abject, how august, How complicate, how wonderful, is man."

When, therefore, it is said, that he proved his sincerity by the sacrifice of his party, that averment must be understood with certain limitations. In his secret heart he believed that party had sacrificed him; and it was not, in point of fact, until he had no party to sacrifice, that the step was taken which alienated him from his old friends for ever, and that the man whom he

had denounced as an assassin in intention was lauded by him as a friend.

Sir Robert Peel was, at the passing of his bill for the repeal of the corn laws, in his fifty-eighth year. The subject was one which had repeatedly come under his consideration, and upon which he had expressed very decided opinions. To suppose that, with his experience, with his mental industry, with his means of information, and with his powers of mind, he should all his life have remained in ignorance of the merits of the question, would be to exhibit a credulity as strange as his change of opinion, when announced, was astounding. In March, 1839, he thus expressed himself:

"We should view," he says, "with regret, cultivation receding from the hill-top, which it has climbed under the influence of protection, and from which it surveys with joy the progress of successful toil. If you convince us that your most sanguine hope would be realised; that this country would become the great workshop of the world; would blight, through the cheapness of food, and the demand for foreign corn, the manufacturing industry of every other country; would present the dull succession of enormous manufacturing towns, connected by railways intersecting the abandoned tracts, which it was no longer profitable to cultivate; we should not forget, amid all these presages of complete happiness, that it has been under the influence of protection to agriculture, continued for 200 years, that the fen has been drained, the wild heath reclaimed, the health of a whole people improved, their life prolonged, and all this, not at the expense of manufacturing prosperity, but currently with its wonderful advancement."

And again, more strongly still. In 1841, just previous to the election, which, relying on the opinion thus expressed by the right honourable baronet, returned such a triumphant majority of Conservatives to parliament:

"The charge is," he says, "that I have reserved to myself such a latitude of action upon all subjects, commercial, political, and financial, that there is not one upon which I am not perfectly at liberty to act, according to that course which I may think conducive to the advancement of my party interests.

"I believe, however, upon the whole, that my political principles are pretty well known. I think the course I have pursued is tolerably clear.

Then, you say, tell us your details; take the corn-laws. I should like to know who has stood forward more than I have done, in defence of the ex

isting corn-laws. I should like to know whether any man looking at these debates can really have a doubt that my desire is to maintain a just and adequate protection to the agricultural interest. Have I not contended for this, while I admitted, and I always will admit, that there may be some details of the present law which require alteration?

"What I say is, that I prefer the principle of a graduated duty to a fixed duty, and that I think protection to agriculture perfectly consistent with manufacturing prosperity; at the same time, I will not bind myself irrevocably against any improvement in the details of the existing law. You are now about to dissolve parliament upon the cry of cheap bread; you promise the substitution of a fixed duty for the present fluctuating one my firm belief is, that a fixed duty will give no effectual protection to the agriculture of Ireland, or of many parts of this country."

Now, surely, if ever minister came into power pledged to any principle, Sir Robert Peel assumed office, upon the defeat of the Whig-Radical ministry, pledged to a principle of protection. If parliament is to be taken as a representation of public opinion, if the man who leads a great party in parliament be the representative of the opinions upon which the individuals of that party were elected, a minister so pledged (and who would have been discredited had he not been so pledged), should either have redeemed his pledges or resigned his seat; nor could any casuistry reconcile a man of high honour to the odious course of using his power for the purpose of defeating the very cause which he was chosen to champion, and promoting the very cause which he had been accredited to defeat. But such was the conduct of Sir Robert Peel. He became again the terror of his friends and the admiration of his enemies. And his victory-why it was just such a victory as the Duke of Wellington might have gained at Waterloo, had he, from some sudden and overpowering conviction that Europe would gain more from the triumph of Bonaparte than from the restoration of the Bourbons, deserted his standard, and carried a large portion of his army over with him to the enemy. Such a victory would not have added much to his laurels.

To say that a statesman like Sir Robert Peel, after a life spent in the public service, remained up to his fifty-eighth year, ignorant of the me

rits of the corn-law question, would be to discredit him altogether as a public man. But that he should have accepted influence as the leader of a party, whose predominance in the House of Commons made him a minister of the crown, and used that influence, upon any pretext, as a means of destroying that party, was conduct which cannot be too strongly reprobated by all who respect political morality, or, indeed, who have not utterly abandoned all just notions of truth and honour.

We do not here enter upon the question whether the bill for the repeal of the corn-laws was right or wrong-whether it was a good measure or a bad one. We are dealing with the character, not with the acts, of this distinguished man; and we do say deliberately, that for his dereliction of principle on this occasion, he deservedly forfeited public confidence ; that his old friends never could trust him more; and that, notwithstanding the advantages of his accession to his new associates, their gratification at his conduct was mingled with anything but respect for himself.

But, supposing his conviction to have been sincere, that such a measure was absolutely necessary, what should he have done? He should have resigned his seat, abandoned office, and given the country an opportunity of pronouncing upon it. He should have respected other men's opinion, by whom he had been elevated to power. In acting as he did, he did that which he was not accredited to do. He belied former convictions, betrayed those who had implicitly confided in him, stifled the public sentiment of all those constituencies who had sent into parliament representatives pledged to protection, but who, under the influence of the right honourable baronet, had all changed their minds. And it was, surely, no more than reasonable, that these constituencies should again, upon so vital a question, have had an opportunity given them of pronouncing upon the measure, which was about to be passed into a law by many whose only title to a seat in the House of Commons was that they had pledged themselves against it. Sir Robert should have acted as he did when about to pass the Emancipation Bill. He resigned his seat for Oxford upon the express ground that he no longer

in reality represented the sentiments of his constituents. But upon this subject, also, he had changed his mind. He had now become convinced that it was his duty as a representative to act upon one set of opinions, although he had been chosen for another; thus making treachery to the body by whom he was elected the means of accomplishing the more extensive treachery to the great party by whom he had been blindly and fondly trusted, and whom, in an evil hour for his own fame, he abandoned.

In his latest speech he prided himself upon the removal of religious distinctions, and asserted that no man's profession of faith was any longer a bar to his promotion in Ireland. Was that true? Could he have been blind to the fact, that the profession of the Romish religion has been made, cæteris imparibus, a ground for promotion? We do not, as we would not be thought invidious, mention names; but the man must be blind to the recent history of this country who could not refer to many instances in which merits the most transcendant have been set aside because the possessor was a Protestant, and deficiencies the most considerable overlooked, because the candidate for office was a Romanist. Was this as it should be?

Of the measures which prostrated the landed interest in Ireland, he was the cause, while he eagerly and effectively aided and abetted ministers in the enactment of the iniquitous poorlaw; a law amounting, in many instances, to confiscation of the little property which remained, when the new corn-law had blasted their agricultural prosperity. Why? Not that he would have been wantonly or wickedly unjust; but, that he contemplated a new order of things, in which Romish should supersede Protestant proprietorship, and an obstacle be thus removed to the full and speedy realization of his fondest hope, that the Romish should be the established religion in Ireland.

Nor has he ever seemed at all sensible of the cruel injustice of measures which have overtaken the wretched Irish proprietors with such a sudden destruction. The corn-law, which reduced the value of land, was aggravated by the poor-law, which made the paupers of Ireland partners with the proprietor in the residue of his pro

perty, in many cases eating up all that remained, and leaving the wretched nominal possessor to bankruptcy and ruin. Surely, their destruction, as a class, must have been clearly meditated by one who either actively promoted, or looked with a tranquil eye on such things.

The Irish landlords may have been improvident themselves, or inherited the consequences of their fathers' improvidence; but that surely was no reason for suddenly coming upon them with measures of extra-penal severity; and not content with leaving them to the liabilities of their own proper embarrassments, aggravating them by enactments, by which they were more than doubled, while their means of meeting them were all but paralyzed.

We do not say that good may not arise out of this evil; but we do say that it could not have been counte. nanced by any one who did not contemplate ulterior ends, and regard the extinction of Irish proprietorship, as it then stood, as a means of facilitating good government in Ireland.

But what is to be said for Sir Robert Peel's heedlessness of, or indifference to, the cases of the persecuted Protestant converts? These poor men have been, and are at this moment, undergoing a most savage and unrelenting persecution, in Galway, in Roscommon, in Clare, at Dingle, at Berehaven, and in many other places, where they are stoned, hooted, insulted, proscribed; where combinations have been formed against selling to or buying from them; where their lives are in jeopardy every hour, and where nothing but the most heroic devotion to their sacred duties could enable their venerable pastors to keep their posts, whose lives may be said to be a continued martyrdom. Of these facts no sane and well-informed man can entertain a doubt, even if recent trials had not rendered them matters of public notoriety, and given them an imperishable record in the conviction and punishment of some of the offenders. One word from Sir Robert Peel in Parliament would have drawn the attention of the Government and of the empire to the miscreants, who, having received

the full benefits of toleration for themselves at his hands, denied it to others. But that word was not spoken. His sympathies were not with the persecuted. No strong emotions were stirred within him at recitals which might be fully verified by his own Irish law officers, and which would have moved a heart of stone. Not that he was without feeling; but that his feelings were in abeyance to his politics. The establishment of Popery was the great end at which he aimed; and the worse than inquisitorial persecution of Protestantism was, therefore, to be connived at, because a parliamentary exposure of it might possibly interfere with this darling object.

We say, deliberately, that upon this subject ALL our Protestant members are to blame. Had the case been reversed, and had Protestants, under the same circumstances, persecuted those of their communion who desired to embrace the Romish religion, the empire would ring with parliamentary denunciations; the Government would be compelled to take some strong measures to protect the aggrieved; and the freedom of conscience which the persecutors claimed for themselves they would be compelled to permit to others. And for such an exercise of their parliamentary privilege we would honour the Roman Catholic members. But we confess that we feel humbled to the ground, that as yet, in the House of Commons, the poor, persecuted, Protestant converts have had no one to make their case fully known; no one to denounce the demons by whom they have been, in many instances, waylaid and murdered; no one to expose the perjuries by which miscreants, in human form, have sought to take away their lives; no one to exhibit, in words of truth and soberness, the popular outlawry by which they have been proscribed; no one to make known, in high quarters, the starvation and misery to which they have been subjected for their adherence to convictions grounded upon the Word of God, and the temptations by which they have been assailed, if they would only forsake the Gospel. "How long, O Lord! holy and just, how long?"*

Nor can we separate this indifference from the frigidity upon matters of religious principle infused into the House of Commons by Sir Robert Peel. In this particular, the late right honourable baronet was strangely inconsistent with himself. He would, perhaps, if properly solicited, have put his hands deep into his pockets, and contributed largely to the relief of these persecuted men, while he would shrink from giving utterance to a word in the house by which public sympathy might be enlisted in their favour. The truth is, he was as liberal of his money as he was jealous of his fame, which he felt to be bound up with his Irish policy; and he could not afford to make acknowledgments by which that policy might be discredited.

The following estimate of his character, by the late member for Newcastle, Mr. Colquhoun, is so just and vivid, that we cannot withhold it from our readers. It expresses all that we feel ourselves far better than we could do, and is, moreover, the production of one who was long a nightly observer of his senatorial labours:

"We estimate highly the official abilities of Sir Robert Peel. We value his experience and his administrative skill,—we regard his tact in affairs and in debate as eminent. Few are abler reasoners; none manage a popular assembly with a more skilful hand. He would have made the most eminent and sagacious of lawyers. As a pleader, he would have commanded the jury and governed the bench. As a judge, his arguments would have been triumphant and his judgments incontrovertible. The eminence of the first Lord Mansfield would have been revived in Sir Robert Peel. But qualities attached to Murray, which also belong to Sir Robert Peel, and the same moral weakness which obscured the fame of the great lawyer, and made him in parliament a timid debater and an unsafe counsel, attach to the premier. In both, the qualities of the reason were such as to constitute a great man. The qualities of the heart lower them to the stature of inferior minds. The perception, the clear judgment, the absence of passion, the tenacious memory, give to them a forethought and a length of combination which form the sagacity of the statesman. In both, the want of nerve, of self-reliance, of

moral resolution, so damp their mind as to make it fall before the flatteries of opponents or their threats. One glance of Mr. Pitt's eye, one wave of his triumphant arm, one thunder from his eloquent voice, and Murray fled, daunted. Had he been prime minister,

there is no concession he would not have made to avoid the clatter of that vehement squadron and the thundering charge of the terrific cornet. Sir Robert Peel, to avoid like assaults, makes the sacrifices which Murray would not have scrupled. The portraits of Lord Mansfield reveal his character. Any one may read on the floor of the House of Commons, still more than in the print-shop, the living portrait of the premier. The glance, sidelong, with which he enters the house, the look askance at his opponents, the anxious eye with which, on rising, he regards them; the shrinking back when a murmur from the opposite benches reaches his ear; the stealing adroitly into a new topic when he finds one unpalateable; the abandonment of opinion or associate when he perceives them to be obnoxious; the skill with which he lays out his argument to catch a cheer, the satisfaction with which he receives it above all from his opponents; these signs mark the adroitness of the debater, and the infirmity of the statesman. When, after such an appearance, he resumes his seat, amid the cheers of his opponents and the silence of his friends, you have revealed to you his character and his policy. His character is to dread attack, and to make any compromise in order to avoid it: his policy is to shape his views according to the opinion of those who are most likely to thwart him. The effect of such a character is to make him adopt the opinions of others, and to borrow them from those who are most opposed to him.

"In a country like ours, and in the days upon which we have fallen, such a character placed in authority has an immense effect. Where publie opinion governs, the important matter is to influence it. A man, therefore, of inflexible resolution and tenacious will, will always leave a strong mark on the opinions of his day. His impetuous force will sweep before it the disjointed materials of public sentiment, and leave in the deep channel which it graves the marks of its irresistible course. If he is the advocate of falsehood, he will make many falsehoods current. If he is the champion of truth, he will be paramount, and long after his day debates and the press will tingle with his words. These will form the opinion of thousands. A man of the character of Lord

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