PAPA COBDEN TAKES MASTER ROBERT Papa Cobden. "Come along, Master Robert, do step out." Master Robert (Peel). "That's all very well, but you know I cannot go as fast as you do."-Punch, Summer, 1845. THE PREMIER'S FIX Punch, Sumner, 1845 1845] PEEL COMING ROUND 131 us. He is now for the extinction of Protection, and pleads only for its gradual abolition, and he makes even this reservation very faintly; we learn from private sources that he is fully resolved now on the principle and only speaks "moderately" on account of his position and former statements. Thou wilt be glad also to hear that Macaulay has given up fixed duties and has expressed himself greatly dissatisfied with Lord John's slow progress from wrong to right. We have some hopes that he will give us one of his brilliant orations when Villiers brings on his motion.' 6 Peel, too, was coming round, like a great ship veering with the tide. In March 1845, as he sat listening to Cobden's argument against the Corn Law, he crumpled up the notes he was making for his reply. You must answer this,' he said to Sidney Herbert, for I cannot.' Disraeli may have been too bitter, but he was not far wide of the mark when he said that Peel's Government, as representing the Corn Law party, was an organised hypocrisy.' His saying that Protection was in the same danger as ' Protestantism in 1828,' was appreciated by a generation that remembered how Peel and Wellington had carried Catholic Emancipation after opposing it for years with all their political energy. The Budget of 1845 took Free Trade forward another immense step in articles other than corn. It was received by the Leaguers in a more friendly spirit than the Budget of 1842, for they now knew that Peel was their ally. The financial scheme of the Government,' wrote Bright to his sister-in-law on February 17, 'is well thought of generally-except that the squires are sulking about it. The debate to-night is on the Income Tax-shall it be continued or not? Of course Peel will succeed in carrying his measures,' and Bright for one is not going to stand in their way. It seemed that Peel, who now had the confidence of the country and the Court as well as of the House of Commons, would remain in office until he had gradually abolished the last vestiges of the Protective system. Disraeli supposed that he meant to abolish the Corn Laws in a few years' time, after another General Election in which the League would not be against him.1 But the normal development of politics was hastened by a catastrophe of nature. In the course of the debate on June 10, 1845, Mark Philips, senior Member for Manchester, said: "Within a short period the 1 Disraeli, Bentinck, pp. 21-22. result of the harvest will be known, and will probably agitate the manufactures and commerce of the country to such an extent that these laws will be at once swept away.' No one took notice of the prophecy, for in June no general alarm was felt for the prospects of the ripening harvest. On August 7 Parliament was prorogued, to meet again more than five months later in a memorable hour. A fortnight after the prorogation of Parliament Bright wrote to his sister-in-law from Rochdale : 'The weather is really most disastrous. It has rained almost incessantly since I left Newcastle. I felt rather sad too on leaving you. I seemed as if I had been hardly civil with any one I had come in contact with. Hard work, knocking about from pillar to post, the result of the Sunderland election and the baseness of some of the Electors 1 and some cold into the bargain upset my equanimity rather.' He little guessed what the rain, which had begun by giving him a cold at the Sunderland by-election, would end by doing for him and for England. If he had known, he might have asked his old enemy the vicar of Rochdale to pray for its continuance. For the next month it rained, and the corn was in the ear. Day by day the farmers went out to watch the ruin of their standing crops. The rain was not the cause of the potato disease that halved the population of Ireland; the potato disease had set in earlier for mysterious reasons unconnected with the autumn weather. But the rain took away all possibility that the four million Irish and two million English who normally subsisted on potatoes could be fed next year on British corn. Meanwhile Bright was attempting to enjoy a well-earned holiday in Scotland with two of his sisters. He records at least one fine day, but, for the most part, 'rain' and 'Scotch mist' enwrapped the scenes of old romance and crime, which were duly sought out by the brother and sisters, admirably familiar as they were with the history of Sir Walter's land. At length, having wandered as far north as Inverness, Bright found there awaiting him a letter from his friend, which read like a death-warrant to the League. Cobden announced that The local Whigs had refused to support Col. Thompson, the Leaguer, who had therefore been defeated by Hudson, the railway King,' by 627 to 497. At the hustings ten thousand non-voters had held up their hands for Thompson and scarcely any for his rival. 1845] A BOLT FROM THE BLUE 133 he had determined at once to retire from public life, and to devote himself to his long-neglected business as the only means of saving himself and his family from ruin. The letter which Bright wrote back is well known to the world in Lord Morley's Life of Cobden. But it has equally a place in the Life of Bright, and those who have read it once will not be sorry to read it again : 'INVERNESS, Sept. 20, 1845. letter of the Its contents It seems as 'MY DEAR COBDEN,-I received your 15th yesterday evening on my arrival here. have made me more sad than I can express. if this untoward event contained within it an affliction personal for myself, great public loss, a heavy blow to one for whom I feel a sincere friendship, and not a little of danger to the great cause in which we have been fellow laborers. But 'I would return home without a day's delay if I had a valid excuse for my sisters who are here with me. We have now been out nearly three weeks, and may possibly be as much longer before we reach home; our plan being pretty well chalked out beforehand, I don't see how I can greatly change it without giving a sufficient reason. it does not appear needful that you should take any hasty step in the matter. Too much is at stake both for you and for the public to make any sudden decision advisable. I may therefore be home in time for us to have some conversation before anything comes before the public. Nothing of it shall pass my lips and I would urge nothing to be done till the latest moment, in the hope that some way of escape may yet be found. I am of opinion that your retirement would be tantamount to a dissolution of the League-its main-spring would be gone. I can in no degree take your place. As a second I can fight, but there are incapacities about me of which I am fully conscious, which prevent my being more than a second in such a work as we have labored in. Don't think I wish to add to your trouble by writing thus; but I am most anxious that some delay should take place, and therefore I urge that which I fully believe, that the League's existence depends mostly upon you, and that if the shock cannot be avoided, it should be given only after the weightiest con 1 It is just at this date that Bright drops the Quaker dating and language from his correspondence, except in the case of letters to Friends. |