Wilde, the Solicitor-general, was strong for refusing to make any return to the writ, and for setting the Court of Queen's Bench at defiance. Had I concurred in this opinion it would certainty have been acted on. The consequences would have been that the Sergeant-at-arms, even with the mace in his hand, would have been sent to Newgate by the Court of Queen's Bench. The House must have retaliated by committing the judges. The crown would then have had to determine on which side the army should be employed, and for a time we must have lived under a military government' (ii., 129). The noble and learned autobiographer does not explain why it should have been indispensable to employ the army on either side.]
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
