llowers of Daniel O'Connell would be sure to oppose the Coercion Bill.
The Liberal party, at least when out of office, had usually made it
their principle to oppose coercion bills if they were not attended with
some promises of legislative reform. The English Radical members, led by
Cobden and Bright, were certain to oppose coercion. If the
Protectionists should join with these other opponents of the Coercion
Bill the fate of the measure was assured, and with it the fate of the
Government. This was exactly what happened. Eighty Protectionists
followed Lord George Bentinck into the lobby against the bill, in
combination with the Free Traders, the Whigs, and the Irish Catholic and
national members. The division took place on the second reading of the
bill on Thursday, June 25th, and there was a majority of seventy-three
against the Ministry.

The moment after Sir Robert Peel succeeded in passing his great measure
of free trade he himself fell from power. His political epitaph,
perhaps, could not be better written than in the words with which he
closed the speech that just preceded his fall: "It may be that I shall
leave a name sometimes remembered with expressions of good-will in those
places which are the abode of men whose lot it is to labor and to earn
their daily bread by the sweat of their brow--a name remembered with
expressions of good-will when they shall recreate their exhausted
strength with abundant and untaxed food, the sweeter because it is no
longer leavened with a sense of injustice."

With the fall of the principle of the protection in corn may be said to
have practically fallen the principle of protection in that country
altogether. That principle was a little complicated in regard to the
sugar duties and to the navigation laws. The sugar produced in the West
Indian colonies was allowed to enter that country at rates of duty much
lower than those imposed upon the sugar grown in foreign lands. The
abolition of slavery in the colonies had made labor there somewhat
costly and difficult to obtain continuously, and the impression was that
if the duties on foreign sugar were reduced it would tend to enable
those countries which still maintained the slave trade to compete at
great advantage with the sugar grown in the colonies by that free labor
to establish which England had but just paid so large a pecuniary fine.
Therefore the question of free trade became involved with that of free
labor; at least, so it se