on
casings. A new parliament was elected; a reform was demanded. The duke
met the demand by a sturdy defiance. He declared, "that the country
already possessed a legislature which answered all the good purposes of
legislation, that the system of representation possessed the full and
entire confidence of the country, and that he was not only not prepared
to bring forward any measure of reform, but would resist such, as long
as he held any station in the government of the country." With those
words the career and credit of the duke as a statesman may be said to
have closed. A perfect hurricane of rage arose around him through all
the land. He was hurled from power, and the Whigs came into office
pledged to a Reform Bill, which, after vain and fierce opposition,
became the law of the land. King William IV. became alarmed at the rapid
progress of reform; he suddenly dismissed the Whigs, and "sent for the
duke." The latter failed again in his discernment of the true slate of
public feeling in England. He refused to become premier, advised the
king to send for Sir Robert Peel (what the latter had been all along
planning and expecting). Sir Robert arrived and formed a ministry, the
duke becoming minister of foreign affairs and leader of the government
party in the House of Lords. This ministry was speedily swept away by
the popular indignation, and the Whigs again returned to power. From
that time the duke seems to have made expediency his sole rule of
political action; he became heart and soul a Peelite. In 1841 he had an
opportunity of upholding Sir Robert Peel in power for some time, and
of aiding him in the great work of commercial and economical reform,
against which both had all their life protested and straggled. It can
hardly be urged in excuse for the duke's long opposition to commercial
reform, that questions of finance and political economy were out of the
proper range of his subjects, for he was a first-rate financier, and a
successful student of political economy. He is represented to have said
of himself that his true genius was the Exchequer rather than the War
Office. "At one of the most critical conjunctures of the Peninsular
war, he drew up a most able paper on the true principles of Portuguese
banking; and at Seringapatam, after very serious evils had been
experienced from a long-standing debasement of the coinage, a memorandum
was accidentally discovered in the treasury from the pen of Colonel
Wellesley, eve