on as they best could upon the narrow base of
their own party. The protectionists gave them to understand that before
Bentinck and his friends made up their minds to turn Peel out, they had
decided that it would not be fair to put the whigs in merely to punish
the betrayer, and then to turn round upon them. On the contrary, fair
and candid support was what they intended. The conservative government
had carried liberal measures; the liberal government subsisted on
conservative declarations. Such was this singular situation.

PEELITES AND PROTECTIONISTS

The Peelites, according to a memorandum of Mr. Gladstone's, from a
number approaching 120 in the corn law crisis of 1846, were reduced at
once by the election of 1847 to less than half. This number, added to
the liberal force, gave free trade a very large majority: added to the
protectionists it just turned the balance in their favour. So long as
Sir Robert Peel lived (down to June 1850) the entire body never voted
with the protectionists. From the first a distinction arose among Peel's
adherents that widened, as time went on, and led to a long series of
doubts, perturbations, manoeuvres. These perplexities lasted down to
1859, and they constitute a vital chapter in Mr. Gladstone's political
story. The distinction was in the nature of political things. Many of
those who had stood by Peel's side in the day of battle, and who still
stood by him in the curious morrow that combined victorious policy with
personal defeat, were in more or less latent sympathy with the severed
protectionists in everything except protection.[208] Differing from
these, says Mr. Gladstone, others of the Peelites 'whose opinions were
more akin to those of the liberals, cherished, nevertheless, personal
sympathies and lingering wishes which made them tardy, perhaps unduly
tardy, in drawing towards that party. I think that this description
applied in some degree to Mr. Sidney Herbert, and in the same or a
greater degree to myself.'[209]

Shortly described, the Peelites were all free trade conservatives, drawn
by under-currents, according to temperament, circumstances, and all the
other things that turn the balance of men's opinions, to antipodean
poles of the political compass. 'We have no party,' Mr. Gladstone tells
his father in June 1849, 'no organisation, no whipper-in; and under
these circumstances we cannot exercise any considerable degree of
permanent influence as a body.'