Sir Robert Peel, he had yielded at last to
the demand for Catholic Emancipation, even although, as Peel and the
Duke himself declared, the concession had been made merely as a choice
between Catholic Emancipation and civil war. Some influential Tories
all over the country were asking whether Ireland had been pacified or
had shown herself in the least degree grateful because an instalment of
religious freedom had been granted to the Roman Catholics, and they
insisted that the Duke had surrendered the supremacy of the Established
Church to no purpose. It was certain, indeed, that O'Connell had not,
in the slightest degree, slackened the energy of his political movement
because the emancipating Act had been passed. Among the opponents of
reform, at all times, there are some who seem to hold that the granting
of one reform ought to be enough to put a stop to all demands for any
{107} other, and that it is mere ingratitude on the part of a man who
has just obtained permission to follow his own form of worship if he
wants also to be put on an equality with his neighbors as regards the
assertion of his political opinions. Therefore, the Ministry found, as
the elections went on, that they had not merely all the reformers
against them, but that a certain proportion of those who, in the
ordinary condition of things, would have been their supporters were
estranged from them merely because they had, under whatever pressure,
consented to introduce any manner of reform.

When the elections were over it seemed to reasonable observers very
doubtful indeed whether King William, however well inclined, would be
able to retain for any length of time the Duke of Wellington and Sir
Robert Peel as the leading advisers of the Crown. The country just
then may be described as in a state of transition from one
constitutional system to another. It was growing more clear, day by
day, that the time had gone by when the sovereign could hold to any one
particular minister, or set of ministers, in defiance of the majority
in the representative chamber and the strength of public opinion
out-of-doors. On the other hand, the time had not yet arrived when the
system introduced and established by the present reign could be relied
upon as part of the Constitution, and the sovereign could be trusted to
accept, without demur, the judgment of the House of Commons as to the
choice of his ministers. The new Parliament was opened on November 5,
and the Ro