mpletely refuted by
the able and eloquent speech of my right honourable friend the Judge
Advocate. (Sir George Grey.) He said, and he said most truly, that those
who hold this language are really accusing, not the Government of Lord
Melbourne, but the Government of Lord Grey. I was therefore, I must say,
surprised, after the speech of my right honourable friend, to hear
the right honourable Baronet the Member for Pembroke, himself a
distinguished member of the cabinet of Lord Grey, pronounce a harangue
against agitation. That he was himself an agitator he does not venture
to deny; but he tries to excuse himself by saying, "I liked the Reform
Bill; I thought it a good bill; and so I agitated for it; and, in
agitating for it, I acknowledge that I went to the very utmost limit of
what was prudent, to the very utmost limit of what was legal." Does not
the right honourable Baronet perceive that, by setting up this defence
for his own past conduct, he admits that agitation is good or evil,
according as the objects of the agitation are good or evil? When I hear
him speak of agitation as a practice disgraceful to a public man, and
especially to a Minister of the Crown, and address his lecture in a
particular manner to me, I cannot but wonder that he should not perceive
that his reproaches, instead of wounding me, recoil on himself. I was
not a member of the Cabinet which brought in the Reform Bill, which
dissolved the Parliament in a moment of intense excitement in order
to carry the Reform Bill, which refused to serve the Sovereign longer
unless he would create peers in sufficient numbers to carry the Reform
Bill. I was at that time only one of those hundreds of members of this
House, one of those millions of Englishmen, who were deeply impressed
with the conviction that the Reform Bill was one of the best laws
that ever had been framed, and who reposed entire confidence in the
abilities, the integrity, and the patriotism of the ministers; and
I must add that in no member of the administration did I place more
confidence than in the right honourable Baronet, who was then First
Lord of the Admiralty, and in the noble lord who was then Secretary for
Ireland. (Lord Stanley.) It was indeed impossible for me not to see that
the public mind was strongly, was dangerously stirred: but I trusted
that men so able, men so upright, men who had so large a stake in the
country, would carry us safe through the storm which they had raised.
And