'The leading spirits on the benches I see before me have openly declared their opinion that if there were not an acre of land cultivated in England it would not be the worse for this country. You have all of you in open chorus announced your object to be the monopoly of the commerce of the universe, to make this country the workshop of the world. Your system and ours are exactly contrary. We invite union; we believe that national prosperity can only be produced by the prosperity of all classes. You prefer to remain in isolated splendour and solitary magnificence. But, believe me, I speak not as your enemy when I say it will be an exception to the principles which seem hitherto to have ruled society if you can maintain the success at which you aim without the possession of that permanence and stability which the territorial principle alone can afford. Although you may for a moment flourish after their destruction, although your ports may be filled with shipping, your factories smoke on every plain, and your forges flame in every city, I see no reason why you should form an exception to that which the page of history has mournfully recorded, that you should not fade like Tyrian dye and moulder like the Venetian palaces.' The great Whig peers, who were the largest of the territorial magnates, were not yet prepared to cut their own throats. Lord John was still for his eight-shilling duty. Peel was for a sliding scale which would lower the duty without extinguishing it. But, as Disraeli observed, 'there is nothing in which the power of circumstance is more evident than in politics. They baffle the forethought of statesmen and control even the apparently inflexible laws of national development and decay.' In the midst of the debate on the customs duties came the Irish famine, and the Corn Laws in any shape were doomed. Protection might have been continued in a moderate form if this catastrophe had not occurred, provided the lords of the soil could have reverted to the practice of their forefathers and looked on their rents as the revenue of their estates, to be expended on the welfare of their dependents. But it was not in them and could not come out of them. On the top of distress in England followed the destruction of the sole means of support which the recklessness of the Irish proprietors had left to five millions of peasants. Sir Robert Peel informed his Cabinet that the duties on grain must be suspended by order of Council, and that if once removed they could never be reimposed. The Cabinet split; Lord Stanley left him. He felt himself that if the Corn Laws were to be repealed he was not the statesman who ought to do it. He resigned, but he could not escape his fate. Lord John Russell could not form a Ministry and 'handed the poisoned chalice back to Peel,' who was forced to return and fulfil his ungracious office. He announced at the opening of the session of 1846 that the debates had convinced him not only of the impolicy but of the