Puseyite chief secretary.

[148] Autobiographic note.

[149] It would appear from the manuscript at the British Museum, that
Macaulay's sentence about Mr. Gladstone as the rising hope of the stern
and unbending tories, which later events made long so famous and so
tiresome, was a happy afterthought, written in along the margin.

[150] Parker's _Peel_, ii. pp. 514-17.

CHAPTER VIII

PEEL'S GOVERNMENT

(_1842-1844_)

In many of the most important rules of public policy Sir R. Peel's
government surpassed generally the governments which have succeeded
it, whether liberal or conservative. Among them I would mention
purity in patronage, financial strictness, loyal adherence to the
principle of public economy, jealous regard to the rights of
parliament, a single eye to the public interest, strong aversion to
extension of territorial responsibilities and a frank admission of
the rights of foreign countries as equal to those of their
own.--MR. GLADSTONE (1880).[151]

Of the four or five most memorable administrations of the century, the
great conservative government of Sir Robert Peel was undoubtedly one. It
laid the groundwork of our solid commercial policy, it established our
railway system, it settled the currency, and, by no means least, it gave
us a good national character in Europe as lovers of moderation, equity,
and peace. Little as most members of the new cabinet saw it, their
advent definitely marked the rising dawn of an economic era. If you had
to constitute new societies, Peel said to Croker, then you might on
moral and social grounds prefer cornfields to cotton factories, and you
might like an agricultural population better than a manufacturing; as it
was, the national lot was cast, and statesmen were powerless to turn
back the tide. The food of the people, their clothing, the raw material
for their industry, their education, the conditions under which women
and children were suffered to toil, markets for the products of loom and
forge and furnace and mechanic's shop,--these were slowly making their
way into the central field of political vision, and taking the place of
fantastic follies about foreign dynasties and the balance of power as
the true business of the British statesman. On the eve of entering
parliament (September 17, 1832), Mr. Gladstone recounts some articles