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justly, to Peel's, was out of heart' at Peel's growing powers. Peel, in 1819, was chairman of the Resumption of Cash Payments Committee, and his influence induced the committee to recommend to the House of Commons, and successfully, a bill for resumption. Its author in Vansittart's place might have anticipated his own future financial reforms by a quarter of a century. But Peel, it may be objected, was both young and out of office. The Ministry, however, actually contained among its senior members Huskisson, who alone among the Tory Ministry had accepted the truths of Adam Smith's gospel.' He would in Vansittart's place have restored common sense to English finance by cancelling the Sinking Fund. Vansittart's actual successor, Robinson, who was already a Minister, did cancel it.

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Robinson, known subsequently as Lord Goderich and Lord Ripon, and more familiarly by the nicknames of 'Prosperity' Robinson and Goody' Goderich, was unsuited for his ultimate post of Prime Minister. Mr. Walpole's condemnation of his statesmanlike capacity is more general. It is that although he must have had some qualifications, besides his birth, to 'win for him his rapid promotions, it is almost impossible for 'the historian to detect where these qualifications lay.' This was the judgment of his contemporaries. His official success as Chancellor of the Exchequer could not be denied; but no one would believe that the merit was his. One great financier the Ministry already contained, and accordingly everybody 'knew,' writes Greville in 1826, when Robinson had been already three years at the Exchequer, that Huskisson was 'the real author of the finance measure of Government.' The complaint was that one minister should be obliged, as titular Chancellor of the Exchequer, to propose and defend measures of which another minister was the real though not the apparent author.' The next year Greville notes that it was Mr. Herries, Secretary to the Treasury, upon whose assistance Robinson had relied to carry on the business of his office, ' and who in fact did it all for him.' The wirepuller might be an eminent statesman like Huskisson, or an obscure subordinate like Herries; but Greville registers the universal conclusion that a compound, like Robinson, of candour, facility, ' and want of firmness,' and who seemed to have no distinct 'ideas' upon the subject of finance, could not be the author of a financial revolution. If he was not its author, he had at any rate the statesman's highest faculty of knowing where to look for good counsels. A budget must always be more or less the work of a council of war at which the Chancellor of the

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Exchequer presides over a meeting of departmental chiefs. At any such gathering the friends of sinking funds were sure to muster in force. Robinson had to arbitrate between them and those who perceived the absurdity of preserving an unreal sinking fund at the price of a chronic deficit. The suicide of Castlereagh caused a reconstruction of the Ministry in 1822. Vansittart retired to the House of Peers and the Duchy of Lancaster, and Robinson succeeded him at the Exchequer. At once he threw his weight into the scale of reason and plain dealing. In his first budget, in 1823, he converted a deficit into a surplus by the simple process of ignoring the Sinking Fund.' He created a new sinking fund, it is true, out of his surplus. But a sinking fund with a surplus was at all events not a monstrosity and a delusion, as was a sinking fund where there was no surplus. The new sinking fund had destroyed one of the most cherished traditions of the Tory party. In his subsequent budgets Robinson dealt a deadly blow to smuggling and illicit distillation by reducing the duties on wine, cider, Irish and Scotch whisky, Dutch gin, and French brandy.

While Robinson was making budgets conform to the rules of arithmetic, Huskisson, who had been appointed President of the Board of Trade, was introducing into our international commerce the principle of reciprocity, then the forerunner, as it is now the rival, of free trade. A reform had been already effected in the currency. In 1819 the House of Commons committee, over which Peel presided, had recommended that cash payments should be resumed by the Bank. A similar recommendation had been made in 1811 by Horner's Bullion Committee. It had then been met and neutralised by a resolution moved by Vansittart, who was at the time a private member, that the promissory notes of the Bank of England have ' hitherto been, and are at this time held to be, equivalent to the legal coin of the realm.' This was a statement distinctly contrary to fact. But that did not prevent the House from affirming it. Vansittart's prejudices were probably in 1819 as in 1811 opposed to definite resumption. The calm reasoning, however, of Peel convinced the committee and the House of the necessity for a step which Mr. Walpole considers perhaps 'the most important incident in the financial history of the 'present century.' If we add this return to a metallic standard to the improvements in the tariff accomplished by Robinson and Huskisson, we observe a revolution in financial policy which makes the endurance of the eleven years' rule of Vansittart all but incomprehensible. Mr. Walpole thus summarises a very extraordinary list of commercial and fiscal reforms:

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'The Budget of 1825 was the natural corollary of the Budgets of 1823 and 1824; but the financial history of the three years was very remarkable. For the first time since the conclusion of the great war the finances of the country had been conducted on an intelligible system. The old Sinking Fund had been abolished, and a new Sinking Fund, which the country had proved able to maintain, had been substituted for it. The funded debt had been reduced from 796,000,000l. to 778,000,000l., the unfunded debt from 38,000,000l. to 31,000,000l. In 1823 the window tax had been reduced by one half; in 1825 the poorer householders had been relieved from the pressure both of house and window tax. The manufacturing classes had been encouraged by the reduction of duties on silk, wool, and iron. The consuming classes had been benefited by the reduction of duties on spirits, wines, coffee, and sugar. The useless bounties on the whale and herring fisheries had been abolished; the bounties on the linen manufacture had been repealed; and the selfish policy which vainly endeavoured to concentrate the carrying trade of the world in British bottoms had been abandoned. During the same period the labour laws had been repealed; and the working classes had, for the first time, been legally permitted to combine for the purpose of raising the rate of wages. Such great alterations in the commercial and industrial legislation of the kingdom had never previously been attempted by any minister. Changes of such importance were not again suggested for another twenty years. The free-trader looks back at the legislation of 1823, 1824, and 1825, as the first admission of the principle which it is his especial object to enforce.' (Vol. ii. pp. 119-120.)

During the same period as great a reform was commenced in the criminal law. Sir Samuel Romilly, during his whole parliamentary life, had been endeavouring to humanise that branch of jurisprudence. In 1808 he had obtained a diminution of the penalty for picking pockets from death to transportation for life. In 1810 he endeavoured to take away the capital penalty for the theft of goods worth five shillings in a shop. The bill passed the Commons; but Lord Ellenborough and Lord Eldon opposed it on the pretext that the bill of 1808 had multiplied pickpockets. Seven bishops voted with the Lord Chancellor and the Lord Chief Justice, thinking it consistent with the principles of their religion to hang a man for shoplifting.' Romilly died, and Mackintosh took up the task. Mr. Walpole considers Mackintosh the bolder and abler champion of reform:- Romilly,' he says, 'had wasted his life in attempting to destroy a cruel system in detail; Mackintosh at once decided to attack it as a whole.' In 1819 Mackintosh obtained the appointment of a select committee to consider so much of the criminal law as related to capital punishment. In the two following years he secured one or two amendments of the law; in June, 1822, he car

ried by 117 votes to 101 a resolution pledging the House at an early period of the next session to take into its serious 'consideration the means of increasing the efficacy of the 'criminal law by abating its undue rigour.' Mr. Walpole thinks the peers and ministers, if the Cabinet had continued unchanged, would probably have remained as deaf to the arguments of Mackintosh in 1823 as in former years to his pleadings and those of Romilly before him. But Peel had in the meantime been installed at the Home Office. Peel would not accept Mackintosh's resolutions, but he embodied their principle in statutes. Five statutes exempting from capital punishment a hundred felonies passed through the House of Lords, where Eldon still presided, without even a debate.

Such,' says Mr. Walpole, was one of the earliest consequences of the death of Castlereagh and the reconstruction. ' of the Liverpool Administration.' Mr. Walpole adds that it was the first time in its history in which the Tory party had the courage to pass over to the popular cause.' We confess we fail to discover the courage or the liberality. What we do perceive is that the new leaders of the party had the prudence to see that it was dangerous to persist in flaunting their affection for barbarous punishments. Their followers did not understand their tardy conversion to humanity; they were merely drilled too well to mutiny. The stupid old Tory party'-as Palmerston, anticipating Mill's sponsorship for the phrase by nearly half a century, called it-suppressed all progress as long as it could, partly because it did not care to learn what was right, and partly because it had a mother's affection for the sickliest of its offspring. We cannot allow that, as a 'party,' it had the courage to pass over to the 'popular cause. Statesmen of noble natures had, by the accident of early associations, grown up in it. But in all the better instincts of their political character Huskisson and Canning were Liberals. At bottom Peel was a Liberal, though he ripened late, and branch by branch. Yet, fettered by the dead weight of colleagues who were Tories by conviction, they had opposed themselves, session after session, to the truths demonstrated by Horner and Ricardo, by Brougham, by Romilly, and by Mackintosh. Our pages had for a score of years denounced absurdities in finance before commonsense budgets were produced. This Review was inculcating principles which are only now about to be embodied in a criminal code, while a Tory Cabinet was still proclaiming that the foundations of society could not be maintained except by

threatening to hang a man for injuring Westminster Bridge,' or breaking down the head of a fishpond.'

He

It would be almost as correct to say of the subsequent grant of Catholic emancipation that in its final sullen acceptance the Tory party had shown the courage to pass over to the popular cause, as it is in respect of criminal law reform. Canning, like his master Pitt, saw both the justice and the expediency of concessions to Catholic subjects. But Canning was from the first suspected and misunderstood by the party whose glory he now is. He was obliged,' exclaims Mr. Greville, contrasting his position with the pious faith in Wellington, to carry men's approbation by storm.' Credit was never given him for good intentions. Mr. Walpole explains only too fully the commencement of the agitation for Catholic relief which it took twenty-nine years to consummate. leads us step by step through the reigns of Elizabeth and the Stuarts to the Treaty of Limerick, and thence through the Georgian era. It is an interesting sketch, but out of place in a history of England from the peace of 1815. Attention is distracted to the scaffolding the author had to erect for himself while at work upon the fabric. Mr. Walpole apologises by declaring that it is impossible to understand the history of 1828 and 1829 without an accurate knowledge ' of the penal laws.' It is impossible to understand the history of any period without knowledge of those which preceded it. But we do not expect to find English history since the Conquest retold by way of introduction to the history of every half-century. Mr. Walpole's excuse for his forty pages of preface abundantly justifies him for the pains he has evidently taken in mastering the course of the movement; it scarcely justifies him in turning the contents of his commonplace book loose into his second volume.

On emerging from the mass of introductory matter we find a very striking picture of the losing battle fought against the claims of manifest justice by the king, who, Wellington told Greville, did not care a farthing about the Catholic question,' and by the king's pseudo-Protestant advisers. The contest had one especially beneficial effect in splitting up the Tory phalanx. Castlereagh himself voted with Canning in the Commons for consideration of the Catholic claims. The Premier, Lord Liverpool, opposed himself in the Lords in their favour to his own Chancellor, Lord Eldon. But the true Tory party, the rank and file, never wavered. No chapter in English history has ever shown more clearly than the contest over Catholic emancipation at once the incapacity of a Con