made apparent, no jury would convict them. Should he then apply to Parliament for a suspension of the Habeas Corpus Act? It was improbable that Parliament, in its present temper of concession to the Catholics, would grant the powers that he demanded. Should he trust to the growing anti-Catholic feeling in England and resort to a dissolution? Here again he was checked, for he could not reckon on a gain of more than forty English seats, and these would be more than balanced by the victories which the Association would secure in the Irish counties. It therefore only remained to him, either to do nothing, or to introduce a large measure of concession accompanied by ample securities. If he did nothing, it was evident that the King's Government must fall into contempt; the Royal prerogative was paralysed; it was impossible to raise an Irish member to the peerage, or appoint one to a ministerial office, without encountering the rival sovereignty of the Association. In this emergency, the Duke wisely and courageously determined to throw overboard all petty considerations of consistency, and to make the sacrifice which the necessities of the country required. His firmness and prestige enabled him to carry his point, and on April 13th, 1829, the Bills for the relief of the Roman Catholics, and the disfranchisement of the forty-shilling freeholders, received the Royal signature, his Majesty informing the Lord Chancellor that he had never before affixed his name with pain or regret to any act of the Legislature.

The emancipation of the Catholics remains a monument of the Duke's patriotism and of his administrative skill, but it also testifies indirectly to his defects as a legislator. It put down the Association, but it left untouched the real evils which gave the Association its power. The wheels of Government were again set in motion, but the teeming population of Ireland, the habits of idleness, the struggle for the soil, the absence of the landlords, all these grievances remained without remedy, to be the cause of future coercion Acts, and to give an excuse to the agitation for repeal. Nor did the securities, on which the Duke fondly relied, prove any protection to the Constitution for whose safety he was so solicitous. Within a very few years the Catholic members of Parliament were found in close alliance with the Whigs, demanding the appropriation of the revenues of the Irish Church, and, though the coalition was defeated by the action of the House of Lords, the downfall of the Establishment was only postponed till the same confederates attacked it with augmented forces in the more democratic campaign of 1869.

But the Duke's want of provident statesmanship was still

more

more characteristically shown in his failure to perceive that Catholic Emancipation must inevitably lead to Parliamentary Reform. The Irish measure was practically a concession to force in the shape of the Catholic Association. Precisely the same conditions that made the Association a power existed in England, in wide-spread physical suffering and general discontent with existing institutions. The same machinery was available for use in the numerous political bodies typically represented by the Birmingham Association, under the presidency of Mr. Attwood, a lesser man than O'Connell, it is true, and with a less dangerous following, but equally the product of organized opinion. As the Clare election was the event which revealed the strength of the great democratic movement in Ireland, so the French Revolution of 1830 was the signal in England for an outburst of common sentiment in favour of Reform. Reform was in the air, and Lord Grey only gave expression to public opinion when he said in his speech on the Address :—

'Relief can only be administered in one way. It must be by securing the affections of the people by removing their grievances -by affording redress-in short (I will venture to pronounce the word), it must be by Reform.'

But the flexible Minister, who had yielded to the tide of democracy the year before, now appeared as the unbending opponent of all concession.

The noble Earl has stated,' said the Duke, 'that he is not prepared himself to come forward with any measure of the kind; and, I will tell him, neither is the Government-nay, I will go further, and say, that I have not heard of any measure, up to this moment, which could in any way satisfy my mind, or by which the state of the representation could be improved, or placed on a footing more satisfactory to the people of this country than it now is. . . . I am thoroughly convinced that England possesses at this moment a legislature which answers all the good purposes of a legislature in a higher degree than any scheme of Government whatever has been found to answer them, in any country in the world; that it possesses the confidence of the country; and that its decisions have justly the greatest weight and influence with the people. Nay, my Lords, I will go yet further, and say, that if at this moment I had to form a legislature for any country, particularly for one like this, in the possession of great property of various descriptions, although perhaps I should not form one precisely such as we have, I would endeavour to produce something which would give the same results, namely, a representation of the people containing a large body of the property of the country, and in which the great landed proprietors have a preponderating influence. In conclusion I beg to state, that not only is the Government not prepared to bring forward any measure of this

description,

description, but that, as far as I am concerned, whilst I have the honour to hold the situation I now do amongst his Majesty's counsellors, I shall always feel it my duty to oppose any such measures when brought forward by others.'

never

Impossible as it is to refrain from admiring the manly directness of this speech, we must admit that it does not redound to the Duke's credit as a statesman. He had committed three blunders in it, of which, as a general, he was guilty: he had taken up a position from which there was no retreat; he had shown himself entirely ignorant of his adversaries' forces; and he had misreckoned his own. His threat of uncompromising resistance was taken up as a challenge by all the radical associations in the kingdom, while the solid ranks of the Tory party, with which he might once have opposed innovation, had been hopelessly broken by the course of his recent policy. So infuriated were the ultra-Tories by the passing of the Emancipation Bill, that the Marquis of Blandford had actually introduced into the House of Commons a scheme of the wildest reform, in the hope that a Parliament, elected by the classes in whom Protestant prejudices were most firmly rooted, might take away from the Catholics the power they had recently acquired. The Whigs on their side had long been waiting on Providence, and shifting their policy according to the disposition of the Duke of Wellington and the health of the King. So long as there seemed any prospect of their being admitted to office they refrained from open opposition, but when the Duke declined their advances, they replaced all their stock motions on the notice book. They were virtuously indignant at jobs, and they exalted as an incomparable philanthropist Joseph Hume, whom, when in office under Canning, they had abused as a mere Radical declaimer. But they had no fixed policy; and when the Duke, in his straightforward way, asked what they proposed to do' for the relief of the distress upon which they were so eloquent, they had no answer to give. It was not until the death of the King and the outburst of public opinion following the French Revolution of 1830, that they were able to exchange their strategy of carping criticism for a regular campaign against the ministry, who were finally defeated on the motion about the Civil List by a coalition of all parties.

Strange as the Duke's miscalculations respecting Reform seem in one who had so accurately reckoned the forces with which he had to deal in granting relief to the Catholics, the motives of his conduct are very clearly set forth in his papers respecting this period. In dealing with Catholic Emancipation, he had not been

insensible

insensible to the danger to which he was exposing the Constitution, but the danger appeared to him contingent and remote, whereas in the second case it was immediate. Not only did he think Parliament as constituted the best possible form of legislature, but Reform was in his mind identical with Revolution. If,' he writes to Maurice Fitzgerald, it should be carried, it must occasion a total change in the whole system of that society called the British Empire; and I don't see how I could be a party to such changes, entertaining the opinions that I do.' What these changes would be, he discloses in a letter to Lord Melville:

'I don't in general take a gloomy view of things; but I confess that, knowing all that I do, I cannot see what is to save Church, or property, or colonies, or union with Ireland, or eventually Monarchy, if the Reform Bill passes. It will be what Mr. Hume calls "a bloodless Revolution.' There will be, there can be, no resistance. But we shall be destroyed one after the other, very much in the order I have mentioned, by due course of law. I confess, therefore, that I am very anxious to resist in limine whilst we can, by all the means that the law allows, and take our chance for the future.'

But, it was urged, a policy of sheer resistance would be followed by a revolution. This the Duke professed not to fear.

'It is,' he says, in a letter to Mr. Gleig, one of the curious circumstances attending this country, and shows in the strongest manner the power of Parliament as now constituted, that, however frequent the changes, convulsions, and revolutions in this country, they have always been made by Parliament. For instance, the Reformation and all its conformations? Parliament. The Commonwealth? Parliament. The Restoration ? Parliament. The Revolution? Parliament. The succession of the House of Hanover? Parliament.

I don't fear a revolution by force. I know that the Government are too strong for any combination of force by the people.'

He therefore writes to Lord Somers that he 'prefers to resist and put down any disturbance that may arise, to the adoption of a measure which all reasoning and experience has shown us must be attended by disastrous consequences.'

No doubt, at nearly fifty years' distance from the Reform Bill, these apprehensions, and the reasonings on which they were based, seem exaggerated. The 'disastrous consequences' foreseen by the Duke have not yet been fulfilled. He could not see 'what was to save Church, or property, or colonies, or union with Ireland, or eventually Monarchy, if the Reform Bill were to pass.' Yet none of the threatened institutions, with the exception of the Irish Church, have yet perished. All this seems to discredit his power of foresight; but it would be Vol. 146.-No. 291. extremely

G

extremely unphilosophical to ridicule him from our own point of security, or to ignore the circumstances on which he based his opinion.

In the first place, all that he said of the unreformed House of Commons was true as far as it went. It had done admirable work in its day. It had preserved the liberties of the country, and, since the Revolution of 1688, had carried through its business with great energy and success. It was by no means impenetrable to the influence of opinion. Nevertheless, it had not proved itself equal to produce the necessary legislation for the people between 1815 and 1830.

Again, Revolution to the mind of the Duke of Wellington presented images far more distinct and dreadful than it does to ourselves. He had seen the first moderate movements in France in 1789 develop into the overthrow of the throne; he had witnessed the confiscation of Church property, the murder of the King, and the Reign of Terror. He knew that beneath the surface of English society there were fierce and desperate passions, such as those which had been revealed in the Cato Street Conspiracy, and that these might at any moment carry the people to the wildest excesses. Nor is it at all certain that,

if Lord Grey had not had the firmness and patriotism to stem the flood of democracy during his ministry, many of the consequences foretold by the Duke might not have been actually realized. Still there is no doubt that the Duke's view of Parliament was mainly a military one; he could not understand how Government could possibly be carried on under a more democratic régime than the one that existed; and he made no allowance for those habits of self-restraint which generations of liberty had produced among the people. He was unable to think of the people as the source of Parliament. Parliament, he said, not the people, had been the author of all the Revolutions which had happened in England. He seems not to have understood that, if the public opinion of the classes which Parliament represented had not sustained it in the struggles to which he refers, Parliament itself would have been powerless to resist the encroachments of the Crown. What, for instance, had Parliament to do with the resistance of the Fellows of Magdalen College to the commands of James II.? Yet this was the turning-point which led to the Revolution of 1688, showing as it did that the most loyal portion of society had forsaken the King. The Duke himself betrays the confusion of his thought on this subject.

The case of Alderman Thompson,' he writes to Mr. Gleig, 'is that of more than half the members of the present Parliament. They dare not vote according to the suggestions of their own judgment

after