ing to the chancellorship of the exchequer, was by the death of his father, Lord Spencer, transferred from the Commons to the Lords, and thus practically killed as an effective statesman. The weakening of the government in the Commons gave the king a pretext, though not a constitutional ground, for dismissing his ministers and putting the premiership in the hands of the Duke of 1834 Wellington, by whom it was passed to Peel. Peel, looking for no crisis, was then in Italy. Had he been on the spot it is probable that his caution would have condemned the venture as premature. As it was, his sense of duty to his sovereign prevailed. He went to the country and, thanks largely to the operation of the Chandos 1835 clause, came back with a gain of seats which showed that reaction had set in. In England he had a decided majority, but Scotland and Ireland turned the scale. Beaten on the Speakership, he yet continued to hold office for three months, during which his main objects, the reconciliation of his party with the new order of things and the promulgation of its amended programme, had been gained. He definitively accepted for himself and his followers the settlement of the Reform Bill. He opened an attractive budget of practical reform, including commutation of tithe, reform of the ecclesiastical courts, a measure for legalizing the marriages of dissenters, an inquiry into church revenues with a view to their better distribution, and a promise of municipal reform. He re-baptized his party, which thenceforth was not Tory, but Conservative. He took up for it a new position as the party of practical improvement opposed to political innovation. To be leader of such a party no one was better fitted than himself. Heir of a great

manufacturer and great land-owner, thus representing both the interests, early trained in office, thoroughly master of the public business, especially in the department, now so important, of finance and trade, a first-rate debater and a skilful manager of the House of Commons, courageous yet cautious and patient, thoroughly conservative yet an open-minded reader of his times, Robert Peel seemed sent to his party by its good genius to steer it through the inevitable transition, regain for it the confidence of the nation, and guide it back to power. He was not without his weak points. His failings were a shyness, strange in one who swayed a great public assembly, which impaired his personal influence, and made him sometimes close when he had better have been communicative; an excess of caution, the result of critical positions as well as of a youth passed in office; and an over-sensitiveness about his own character which betrayed itself not only in unnecessary vindications, but, as his temper was hot though generally under strict control, led him to challenge more than one assailant to a duel. Nor was he equally popular with all sections of the party. Stiff old Tories of the Eldonian school might still withhold their confidence. Aristocracy might not quite forget that Peel was a cotton-spinner's son. Yet the mass of Conservatives saw the value of their leader and when upon the passing of a resolution in favour of the secularization of part of the surplus revenues of the Irish church he announced his resignation to the House, the cheers of 1835 sympathy, not from his own side alone, amidst which he sat down were morally the voice of victory.

1834

THE

CHAPTER IX

THE FRUITS OF PARLIAMENTARY REFORM

HE Melbourne Ministry was now restored to office, but hardly to power. The Whigs, its only assured following, were outnumbered in the House of Commons by the opposition consisting of Tories and Conservatives. For its majority it was dependent partly on the Radicals, who lent it a cold, uncertain, and somewhat contemptuous support; partly on O'Connell and his "tail," whose support was not only uncertain, especially on Irish questions, but highly compromising in British and protestant eyes, so that the alliance with him, nicknamed the Lichfield House Compact, was morally a heavy drag on the government. A precarious union was enforced among these sections by the formidable force of the common enemy, whose return to power would have been fatal to them all. The Prime Minister, shelved in the House of Lords, could do little more than show his good temper and discretion in the leadership of a hopeless minority. Liberal in creed, but Conservative in grain, in all things a sceptic, not having sought the premiership, but liking it when events had wafted him into it, he wanted no more change than was needful for the filling of his part as the Reform premier and would gladly have put off all change to the morrow. Brougham had been excluded from the reconstructed cabinet by indiscretions and escapades which

passed all bounds; he had played most fantastic tricks in a tour of vanity through Scotland. Fortunately, however, for his former colleagues his electricity at first found vent in combats with Lyndhurst rather than in vengeful attacks on the administration. The leader in the House

of Commons, the soul of the government in home affairs, was Lord John Russell, who for the present proclaimed the finality of his Reform Bill, though he was in the sequel fain once more to woo for his flagging sails the breeze which had first borne him into power. Lord John was a good tactician, but no match for Peel, whose ascendancy in the House had now been completely established. With a powerful minority in the Commons and a Tory House of Lords, Peel had a veto on legislation. His own tendency and policy were not obstruction but moderation. In practical reform he would probably have been willing to go further had he not been checked by the Tory section of his party in the House of Commons and by the Toryism of the House of Lords. Over the Toryism of the House of Lords he maintained a somewhat precarious control through the Duke of Wellington, who, though opposed to change, was a practical strategist and generally recognized in Peel the commander-in-chief of the party. Peel's ambition was very cautious, and he had no intention of precipitating the fall of the Whig government that he might go on another forlorn hope.

Bound up with reform of parliament and sure to attend it, was municipal reform. The close corporations had in fact been the chief organs of electoral abuse and corruption. Commissioners of inquiry to prepare complex subjects for parliament were becoming instruments of government. A commission of inquiry into the state

of the municipal corporations reported that there was crying need of reform. Under cover of antiquated charters self-elected municipalities had become gangs of public thieves, misgoverning the towns, stealing the corporate property, abusing it for political purposes or wasting it in revelry, jobbing the appointments, and selling the parliamentary representation, sometimes for a regular sum.

The basis of the city constituency,

instead of tax-paying, was the freedom of the city, a relic of the commercial middle ages, now a figment and a cover for abuse. There were cities in which only a trifling minority of the ratepayers were members of the corporation. A city council might be made up of a boroughmongering magnate, two members of his family, three or four of his dependents, and an officer of the corporation. Of the charitable funds three-fourths or more might go to the Blue party. The judicial powers of the corporations, owing to medieval accident, varied absurdly, and were often vested in untrustworthy hands. Peel and Wellington consented, Peel no doubt most willingly, to reform. 1835 Elective government on a ratepaying basis was given to all boroughs, including cities such as Manchester and Birmingham hitherto unincorporated, and to such as might thereafter apply for it. The charitable funds and the judicial power were respectively placed in trustworthy hands. The city of London alone by its grandeur repelled reform and retained its ancient government, its Gog and Magog, the pomp and banquets of its Mansion House, and those sumptuous survivals of medieval trade, its guilds, with their vast wealth and its then equivocal application. The Tory Lords would gladly have thrown out the Bill; they entered, in would have been