y the Court of
Queen's Bench. The House must have retaliated by committing the judges.
The crown would then have had to determine on which side the army should
be employed, and for a time we must have lived under a military
government" (ii., 129). The noble and learned autobiographer does not
explain why it should have been indispensable to employ the army on
either side.]

CHAPTER XII.

Sir Robert Peel becomes Prime-minister.--Commercial Reforms.--
Free-trade.--Religious Toleration.--Maynooth.--The Queen's
University.--Post-office Regulations.--The Opening of Letters.--
Naturalization of Aliens.--Recall of Lord Ellenborough.--Reversal of the
Vote on the Sugar Duties.--Refusal of the Crown to Sanction a Bill.--The
Question of Increase in the Number of Spiritual Peers.--Repeal of the
Corn-laws.--Revolution in France, and Agitation on the Continent.--Death
of Sir Robert Peel.--Indifference of the Country to Reform.--Repeal of
the Navigation Laws.--Resolutions in Favor of Free-trade.--The Great
Exhibition of 1851.

The transactions mentioned in the last chapter were among the last
events of Lord Melbourne's ministry. He had for some time been aware of
his impending defeat in the House of Commons, and, greatly to his
credit, had endeavored to make the return to office easier to his
successors by the friendly counsels he had given to the Queen on the
subject.[258] A dissolution of Parliament in the summer of 1841 only
weakened his party, and in September he resigned, and was succeeded by
Sir Robert Peel, who, comparatively short as was his tenure of
office,[259] found it long enough to establish for himself a reputation
as the greatest financier of Europe since the days of Pitt. It may be
worth remarking that, in the "Memoirs of the Prince Consort," it is
mentioned that in the course of his administration Peel found reason to
change his judgment on the question of which House of Parliament it was
the more desirable for the Prime-minister to be a member. Canning had
more than once asserted his conviction that the public business would be
more satisfactorily conducted when the Prime-minister was a commoner,
founding his opinion chiefly on the paramount importance of financial
questions, the discussion of which is almost confined to the House of
Commons, and conceiving it to be supported by the history of the
administration of Pitt, from whom, indeed, he had imbibed the idea; and
in former years Peel had more than