Election let in the Whigs, who formed a strong governmentthe most aristocratic of the nineteenth century "-under Lord Grey. Reform was introduced and the Bill was at last carried into law amid the greatest agitation and excitement. Peel had come to the conclusion that moderate reform of the representative system was necessary, but he was absolutely opposed to the sweeping measure (as it was considered to be) of the Bill of 1832. When the Bill was first introduced into the House of Commons, Peel heard the provisions "almost with stupefaction; his opponents, watching him curiously, saw him turn slowly crimson; until at last, as if unable to control himself, he bent forward and hid his face in his hands." In speaking against the Bill he lost all self-control; the submerged passion below the icy exterior broke out irresistibly; the haughty man of dignified moderation now stood, wrote John Cam Hobhouse, " unmasked."

This was the time when surely Peel might, without much blame, have succumbed to the temptation of retiring into private life. England, in his view, was going along the wrong road; nothing would stop it; all his efforts and warnings were unavailing. But it would last his time. Two years previously he had inherited his father's baronetcy and £30,000 a year. He had a charming and devoted wife to whom he was deeply attached. He had a household full of happy children and growing boys. He would never be weary in private life with his field-sports, his picture-gallery, his library and his thriving family. Many men would have washed their hands of the whole ungrateful business of politics, especially if they were called names like traitor, trimmer, deceiver, place-hunter, by their own party. This, however, was not Peel's way. He never despaired of the State. He remained in politics, loyally accepting the new system which the Reform Act had created, and resolved to make the best of it. Certainly he could have been very troublesome to the government, who were not finding their position at all easy after the passage of the Reform Bill. Yet, "what are we doing?" wrote Peel to Croker. "We are making the Reform Bill work; we are falsifying our own predictions we are pro

tecting the authors of the evil from the work of their own hands." The public was touched by this behaviour of a true gentleman. Peel went down to the House, after the first General Election held under the Reform Act, the leader of a small and discredited

minority; he returned home that night, notes Raikes," with the tide of popularity running full in his favour." He remained true to the new policy, and in 1834, in the Tamworth Manifesto, issued on his taking office as Prime Minister, he stated his adherence to the Reform Act and in general to a continuance of the policy of moderate and steady reform.

In 1834 the Whig Government had fallen. The event was so little expected at the time that Peel had gone abroad with his family for the winter and was actually at Rome when the summons to be Prime Minister reached him. For the Duke of Wellington had no intention of assuming the highest position this time. He temporarily took the post of Prime Minister and all the Cabinet offices (so as not to prejudice the coming Prime Minister's ultimate choices) until Peel, travelling in all haste, could return from Italy. For three weeks the Duke carried the weight of the whole government on his old shoulders and then resigned to the younger man. Peel formed a ministry which, although shortlived, was a remarkable collection of present or future notabilities -Lord Ashley, Lord Mahon, Gladstone, Sidney Herbert; these comparatively young men in minor positions were grouped with the veterans, the Duke of Wellington (Foreign Secretary), Aberdeen (War and the Colonies), Lyndhurst (Lord Chancellor), Hardinge (Irish Secretary); at the Board of Trade was an eminent banker, Alexander Baring, afterwards known as Lord Ashburton.

Peel's Government never had a real majority, and he resigned in April, 1835. Lord Melbourne came into office and his ministry lasted through the early years of Queen Victoria's reign and the Chartist troubles. Peel might have been Prime Minister again in 1839, but he failed to agree with the queen over the appointment of the Ladies of the Bedchamber. In 1841, however, Melbourne's position in parliament, after a General Election, had become quite untenable; Peel became Prime Minister with a commanding majority (1841). This was to be the beginning of great things.

The government which Peel formed in 1841 was notable for its personalities: Lord Aberdeen, the lofty-minded Foreign Secretary, in whose time relations of almost perfect confidence were attained with France and the United States; Sir James Graham, Home Secretary, a Whig or former Whig, the best

administrator in the country after Peel himself; the Duke of Wellington, still vigorous, Leader of the House of Lords; Sidney Herbert, Secretary to the Admiralty; Gladstone, VicePresident of the Board of Trade.

Yet the prospects were disheartening. In the years from 1837 to 1840, under the Melbourne Government, the financial system of the country had gone into confusion. Every year there was a deficit; Peel in 1841 took over accumulated deficits of £8,000,000. The distress in the country was frightful. Conditions were no better than when the Poor Law Commission reported in 1834, although no doubt the cutting off of allowances (or subsidies) in aid of wages had prevented conditions from growing still worse. In 1841 one person out of every eleven in England was a pauper. Conditions in Scotland were equally bad. There were, wrote Peel," thousands and tens of thousands in want of food and employment, at Greenock, Paisley, Edinburgh and a dozen large towns." People vaguely talked of emigration for solving the problem, but there was really no sign of any improvement. Practically everything, including all imported foodstuffs except potatoes, was taxed. "Look," wrote Peel to Croker, "at the congregation of manufacturing masses, the amount of our debt, the rapid increase of poor-rates. We must make this country a cheap country for living. The danger is not from low price from the tariff, but low price from inability to consume, from the poor man giving up his pint of beer, and the middling man giving up his joint of meat." He had already made up his mind to attack the tariff, including the corn duties, although he saw that reductions must not be made with too startling suddenness.

The budget of 1842 which Peel himself introduced (although Goulbourn was Chancellor of the Exchequer) dealt with the existing deficit not by raising but by lowering about 750 different duties. These remissions would have the effect immediately of lowering prices and therefore of increasing consumption. In a short time the lower duties would probably bring in much more revenue than the old higher duties. In the meantime the loss to revenue was to be made good by a new tax, the Income Tax, of 7d. in the £1 on incomes above £150. Peel's presentation of this budget, wrote the diarist Greville, simply " took the House by storm." It was a tremendous stride towards Free Trade,

although that goal was still far off. The old duties on imported corn, according to the scale of 1829, varied from one shilling on a quarter when the price of home-grown corn was 73 shillings a quarter, to a duty of 27 shillings a quarter when the price of homegrown was 59 shillings. Peel reduced them by one-half; nevertheless they were ruinously heavy. These duties were simply an enormous subsidy to British landlords and farmers at the expense of everybody who ate bread, and particularly of the poorest class of all whose diet has the highest proportion of bread.

Economical reform was proceeded with gradually. In 1844 the Bank of England Charter Act was passed, and its provisions are still in force. The budget of 1845 abolished 430 duties altogether. Trade rebounded to these reductions; the rate of taxation was reduced by about 100,000; there was a surplus of nearly one and a-half millions for repayment of debt; and favourable conversions of the debt were being carried out; by the end of 1845 there was almost complete free trade in raw materials and manufactured articles. The time was now ripe for the final step, for the repeal of the corn duties. Peel himself was convinced, as his way was, by his observation of the actual results of tariff reduction and by his careful study of reports and papers. The middle classes had been converted by the arguments of Cobden and Bright, and by the many lecturers whom the Anti-Corn Law League sent around the country. The labouring classes, curiously, seem to have taken little interest in the question. of repeal, although the agricultural labourer who rose to his feet at a League lecture and said: "I be protected, and I be starving" must have had a fairly complete vision of the truth.

The immediate cause of the repeal of the Corn Laws was the Irish famine of 1845-1846. But repeal was fated to come, anyhow. It is a curious fact that Peel's two greatest decisions--and what opponents called his two grand betrayals-were made in close connection with Irish affairs: Catholic Relief in 1829, repeal of the Corn Laws in 1846. He was certainly deeply interested in the Irish problem-political, religious and social. In 1845 he had instituted the Queen's Colleges-one at Belfast, intended chiefly for Protestant dissenters, one at Galway and another at Cork, intended chiefly for Roman Catholics. He received no gratitude in Ireland for this, at any rate not from the Roman Catholics. The bishops would have nothing to do with the Queen's Colleges, and the Pope condemned them in 1851.

The people who had given Peel a majority at the general election of 1841 had probably no idea at all that he would propose a repeal of the Corn Laws. He had not, it is true, given any pledge to maintain them; but the customs of the constitution were against his introduction of any revolutionary change without first giving the country an opportunity of consultation on the question. Moreover, Peel had not a majority in either House on the question of repeal; he could only carry it with the support of Lord John Russell and the Whigs. Peel knew all this, but he believed that the national interest required repeal there and then. In fact he felt that his honour required him to do the very thing which his critics considered to be a dishonourable action. "The honour of public men would not have been maintained," said Peel, "if a minister had at a critical period shrunk from the duty of giving advice which he believed to be best, and from incurring every personal sacrifice which the giving of that advice might entail." He placed repeal before the Cabinet. Failing to obtain agreement, he necessarily tendered his resignation to the Queen; his friends noticed the relief which he obviously felt at being quit of his ungrateful public labour. At the following Privy Council meeting he was, writes Greville," full of jokes and stories."

Lord John Russell was commissioned by the Queen to form a Government. Peel promised to use all his influence in both Houses to enable Russell to carry through repeal. Russell's own party, however, was divided over the question and he was unable to form a Government. So Peel had to come back into office (December 20, 1845), with a Cabinet shorn of two of its former members, but resignedly determined to follow the Prime Minister on the question of repeal. It was in these extraordinary circumstances that the "Peelites " with the help of the Whigs, and in the teeth of most determined opposition from Lord George Bentinck, Disraeli and the ultra-Tories, carried the repeal of the Corn Laws in the House of Commons on May 15, 1846. The Duke of Wellington, who was still in the Cabinet, again did yeoman service for his colleagues and carried the Bill through the House of Lords. It was a deadly struggle in Parliament from January 22 to June 25, 1846; it made the name of Disraeli and it broke up the Tory party, but it saved England from the stranglehold of agricultural protection. It marks the definite establishment of free trade, not simply in corn, but in everything, and is