ome politics,
the tide began to set towards reform. The renewed oppression of the
Continent by the old reigning families, the countenance apparently given
by the English Government to the conspiracy against liberty called the
Holy Alliance, and the enormous weight of the national debt and taxation
occasioned by so long and costly a war, rendered the government and
parliament very unpopular. Radicalism, under the leadership of the
Burdetts and Cobbetts, had assumed a character and importance which
seriously alarmed the Administration: and their alarm had scarcely been
temporarily assuaged by the celebrated Six Acts, when the trial of Queen
Caroline roused a still wider and deeper feeling of hatred. Though the
outward signs of this hatred passed away with its exciting cause, there
arose on all sides a spirit which had never shown itself before, of
opposition to abuses in detail. Mr. Hume's persevering scrutiny of the
public expenditure, forcing the House of Commons to a division on every
objectionable item in the estimates, had begun to tell with great force
on public opinion, and had extorted many minor retrenchments from an
unwilling administration. Political economy had asserted itself with
great vigour in public affairs, by the petition of the merchants of
London for free trade, drawn up in 1820 by Mr. Tooke and presented by
Mr. Alexander Baring; and by the noble exertions of Ricardo during the
few years of his parliamentary life. His writings, following up the
impulse given by the Bullion controversy, and followed up in their turn
by the expositions and comments of my father and McCulloch (whose
writings in the _Edinburgh Review_ during those years were most
valuable), had drawn general attention to the subject, making at least
partial converts in the Cabinet itself; and Huskisson, supported by
Canning, had commenced that gradual demolition of the protective system,
which one of their colleagues virtually completed in 1846, though the
last vestiges were only swept away by Mr. Gladstone in 1860. Mr. Peel,
then Home Secretary, was entering cautiously into the untrodden and
peculiarly Benthamic path of Law Reform. At this period, when Liberalism
seemed to be becoming the tone of the time, when improvement of
institutions was preached from the highest places, and a complete change
of the constitution of Parliament was loudly demanded in the lowest, it
is not strange that attention should have been roused by the regular
ap