elieve trade, and to stimulate and
replenish the reciprocal flow of export and import. That he at this
time, or perhaps in truth at any time, had acquired complete mastery of
those deeper principles and wider aspects of free trade of which Adam
Smith had been the great exponent--principles afterwards enforced by the
genius of Cobden with such admirable still, persistency, and patriotic
spirit--there was nothing to show. Such a scheme had no originality in
it. Huskisson, and men of less conspicuous name, had ten years earlier
urged the necessity of a new general system of taxation, based upon
remission of duty on raw materials and on articles of consumption, and
upon the imposition of an income-tax. The famous report of the committee
on import duties of 1840, often rightly called the charter of free
trade, and of which Peel, not much to his credit, had at this moment not
read a word,[154] laid the foundations of the great policy of tariff
reform with which the names of Peel and Gladstone are associated in
history. The policy advocated in 1830 in the admirable treatise of Sir
Henry Parnell is exactly the policy of Peel in 1842, as he acknowledged.
After all it is an idle quarrel between the closet strategist and the
victorious commander; between the man who first discerns some great
truth of government, and the man who gets the thing, or even a part of
the thing, actually done.

PEEL'S GOVERNMENT

Mr. Gladstone has left on record some particulars of his own share as
subordinate minister not in the cabinet, in this first invasion upon
the old tory corn law of 1827. Peel from the beginning appreciated the
powers of his keen and zealous lieutenant, and even in the autumn of
1841 he had taken him into confidential counsel.[155] Besides a letter
of observations on the general scheme of commercial freedom, Mr.
Gladstone prepared for the prime minister a special paper on the corn
laws.

The ordinary business of the department soon fell into my hands to
transact with the secretaries, one of them Macgregor, a
loose-minded free trader, and the other Lefevre, a clear and
scientific one. In that autumn I became possessed with the desire
to relax the corn law, which formed, I believe, the chief subject
of my meditations. Hence followed an important consequence. Very
slow in acquiring relative and secondary knowledge and honestly
absorbed in my work, I simply thought o