education, as
collegiate education then went, was so thorough a Tory of the old
school that the most extravagant arguments he used came as naturally
and clearly to his mind as if they had been dictated to him by
inspiration. But a man of Peel's high order of intellect, a man who
had been gifted by nature with the mind of a statesman, must sometimes
have found it hard indeed to convince himself that some of the
arguments he used against reform {147} were arguments which the history
of the future would be likely to maintain. Peel's genius, however, was
not one which readily adopted conclusions, especially when these
conclusions involved a change in the seeming order of things. We have
seen already that he was quite capable of taking a bold decision and
accepting its responsibilities when the movement of events seemed to
satisfy him that a choice one way or the other could no longer be
postponed.

The whole story of his subsequent career bears evidence of the same
effect. His genius guided him rightly when the fateful moment arrived
at which a decision had to be made, but when left to himself his
inclinations always were to let things go on in their old way. He had
not yet seen any necessity for a complete system of Parliamentary
reform, nor was he likely, in any case, to have approved of some of the
proposals contained in the Bill brought in by Lord John Russell. The
speech he delivered appears, by all the accounts which reach us, to
have been a genuine piece of Parliamentary eloquence. Peel did not, as
may well be imagined, commit himself to some of the extravagances which
were poured forth in absolute good faith by Sir Robert Inglis. But the
very nature of his task compelled him sometimes to have recourse to
arguments which, although put forward with more discretion and more
dexterity than Inglis had shown, seemed nevertheless to belong to the
same order of political reasoning.

It is not, perhaps, surprising that Peel should have found much to say
for the existence of the small nomination boroughs, seeing that the
same arguments were made use of a whole generation afterwards by no
less a person than Mr. Gladstone. These arguments, we need hardly say,
were founded on the familiar assumption that a Burke or a Sheridan, a
Canning or a Plunket, would have no chance whatever of getting into the
House of Commons if some appreciative patron did not generously put a
borough at his disposal. In our own days we have