SIR ROBERT PEEL

There is probably no other English public man of the present century
whose career has attracted in so large a measure the interest both of
politicians and of men of letters as Sir Robert Peel. In addition to a
crowd of industrious but not very distinguished compilers, it has been
discussed with great skill by Guizot, by Lord Dalling, by Mr. Goldwin
Smith, and by Mr. Spencer Walpole; and in that great literature of
monographs which has grown up with such remarkable rapidity in England
within the last decade, no less than three have been devoted to the
life of Peel. The interest that attaches to him is, indeed, of a very
peculiar character. He was almost wholly destitute of the power of
imagination that is so conspicuous in the careers or speeches of
Chatham and Burke, of Canning and Beaconsfield. Except during a few
years that followed the Reform Bill of 1832, he never exhibited the
spectacle of a leader struggling successfully against enormous odds.
He was not one of those statesmen who see further than their
contemporaries, and who, after years of failure and struggle, are
proved by their ultimate triumph to have most truly read the
tendencies of their age. Though he was three times Prime Minister of
England, and though he was for a time deemed the most brilliant of
party leaders, he left the great and powerful party which trusted him
almost hopelessly shattered. Twice in his life he carried measures of
transcendent importance which he had not only persistently opposed,
but had been specially placed in power for the purpose of resisting.
The most striking incidents in his career are incidents of failure
rather than of success, and history has pronounced that, on the most
important questions of his time, he was disastrously wrong. The long
delay in the inevitable emancipation of the Catholics, which was
largely due to him, and the circumstances under which he ultimately
carried the measure, produced evils that are in full activity at the
present hour. His persistent opposition to parliamentary reform
contributed to bring England to the very verge of revolution; though
when the Reform Bill had been carried he nobly retrieved his error by
the frankness with which he accepted, and the skill with which he
used, the new conditions of English politics. His abolition of the
Corn Laws at the head of a Government which had been pledged to
maintain them gave a great shock to public confidence, and for a long