ch of his own
quoted in proof of the inconsistency of the Peelites. Here are a couple
of entries from Lord Broughton's diary for 1844:--'_June 17._ Brougham
said "Gladstone was a d----d fellow, a prig, and did much mischief to
the government," alluding to his speech about keeping sugar duties.
_June 27._ Gladstone made a decided agricultural protection speech, and
was lauded therefor by Miles--so the rebels were returning to their
allegiance.' Gladstone's arguments, somebody said, were in favour of
free trade, and his parentheses were in favour of protection.

Well might the whole position be called as slippery a one as ever
occurred in British politics. It was by the principles of free trade
that Peel and his lieutenant justified tariff-reform; and they
indirectly sapped protection in general by dwelling on the mischiefs of
minor forms of protection in particular. They assured the country
gentlemen that the sacred principle of a scale was as tenderly cherished
in the new plan as in the old; on the other hand they could assure the
leaguers and the doubters that the structure of the two scales was
widely different. We cannot wonder that honest tories who stuck to the
old doctrine, not always rejected even by Huskisson, that a country
ought not to be dependent on foreign supply, were mystified and amazed
as they listened to the two rival parties disputing to which of them
belonged the credit of originating a policy that each of them had so
short a time before so scornfully denounced. The only difference was the
difference between yesterday and the day before yesterday. The whigs,
with their fixed duty, were just as open as the conservatives with their
sliding-scale to the taunts of the Manchester school, when they
decorated economics by high _a priori_ declaration that the free
importation of corn was not a subject for the deliberations of the
senate, but a natural and inalienable law of the Creator. Rapid was the
conversion. Even Lord Palmerston, of all people in the world, denounced
the arrogance and presumptuous folly of dealers in restrictive duties
'setting up their miserable legislation instead of the great standing
laws of nature.' Mr. Disraeli, still warmly on the side of the minister,
flashed upon his uneasy friends around him a reminder of the true
pedigree of the dogmas of free trade. Was it not Mr. Pitt who first
promulgated them in 1787, who saw that the loss of the market of the
American colonies made it nec