whig politicians,--should be removed
from the personal service of the sovereign. As this was refused,
he abandoned for the time any attempt to form a government, and his
opponents remained in office till September, 1841. It was then Sir
Robert Peel became the first lord of the treasury, and the Duke of
Wellington, without office, accepted a seat in the cabinet, taking
the management of the House of Lords. His ministry was formed on
protectionist principles, but the close of its career was marked by
the adoption of free trade doctrines differing in the widest and most
liberal sense. Sir Robert Peel's sense of public duty impelled him
once more to incur the odium and obliquy which attended a fundamental
change of policy, and a repudiation of the political partizans
by whose ardent support a minister may have attained office and
authority. It was his fate to encounter more than any man ever did,
that hostility which such conduct, however necessary, never fails
to produce. This great change in our commercial policy, however
unavoidable, must be regarded as the proximate cause of his final
expulsion from office in July, 1846. His administration, however, had
been signalized by several measures of great political importance.
Among the earliest and most prominent of these were his financial
plans, the striking feature of which was an income-tax; greatly
extolled for the exemption it afforded from other burdens pressing
more severely on industry, but loudly condemned for its irregular and
unequal operation, a vice which has since rendered its contemplated
increase impossible.

Of the ministerial life of Sir Robert Peel little more remains to be
related except that which properly belongs rather to the history of
the country than to his individual biography. But it would be unjust
to the memory of one of the most sagacious statesman that England ever
produced to deny that his latest renunciation of political principles
required but two short years to attest the vital necessity of that
unqualified surrender. If the corn laws had been in existence at the
period when the political system of the continent was shaken to its
centre and dynasties crumbled into dust, a question would have been
left in the hands of the democratic party of England, the force of
which neither skill nor influence could then have evaded. Instead
of broken friendships, shattered reputations for consistency, or
diminished rents, the whole realm of England mig