In 1845 he repeated his stroke, and circumstances were gradually imposing a ...

In 1845 he repeated his stroke, and circumstances were gradually imposing a larger policy on his mind. Of his young men, Gladstone, Lincoln, Canning, Ramsay were

Free Traders already, and Peel, behind the repellent

front which he turned to the world, and which, indeed, cost him / her his life, was exceptionally sensitive to the ideas, and the sufferings, of others.

The prosperity of the mid-forties had not spread to the villages; whatever the cause, the consequences were plain enough: 'I be protected and I be starving.' One good harvest more, to keep the League quiet, and he would go to the country as a Free Trader, with the compensating offer of a credit for the re-conditioning of the land and the absorption of the next wave of unemployment, and return with the middle-class Conservatism he had created, solidly based on the gratitude of the towns and the regeneration of the farming interest.

The disaster which depopulated Ireland shattered the Conservative party on the threshold of a generation of power.' The Irish difficulty went deeper than the philosophy of the age could reach.

The twin cell of English life, the squire administering what everybody recognizes as law and the parson preaching what everybody acknowledges to be religion, had no meaning in a country where the squire was usually an invader and the parson always a heretic. England had staked the good government of Ireland on a double speculation, that the Irish would conform to the Protestant establishment and that they would accept the English use of landlord, farmer, and labourer.

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