The precise seat of Sir Robert Peel's difficulty at home was, that his immediate predecessors had (whether wilfully or otherwise signifies nothing for the present) raised expectations among the people, which _no party_ could satisfy; while their measures has reduced the people to a state in which the disappointment of those expectations seemed to excuse, if not justify, even downright rebellion. They arrayed the agricultural and manufacturing interests in deadly hostility against each other; they sought to make the one responsible for the consequences springing only from the reckless misconduct of the other. The farmers must be run down and ruined in order to repair the effects of excessive credit and over-trading among the manufacturers; the corn-grower must smart for the sins of the cotton-spinner. Such were some of the fierce elements of discord in full action, when the affairs of the nation were committed by her Majesty to her present Ministers, on whom it lay to promote permanent domestic tranquillity, amidst this conflict between interests which had been taught that they were irreconcilable with each other; to sustain the public credit at once, without endangering our internal peace and safety, or compromising the honour of the nation in its critical and embarrassing foreign relations. How were they to effect these apparently incompatible objects? "See," said the enemies of the Ministry, "see, by and by, when parliament assembles, a cruel specimen of _class legislation_--the unjust triumph of the landed interest--the legitimate working of the Chandos clause in the Reform Bill!" But bear witness, parliamentary records, how stood the fact!