as to obviate the good that might have been produced by timely and voluntary concessions; and now, coming forward as he says, 'to resist the pressure from without,' he finds himself compelled to yield to that pressure; for what, after all, is the language which he now holds, what are his addresses, his speeches, his promises, his Church Commission, but a surrender to the spirit and the principle of Reform, and to the demands of the people--_the people_, as contra-distinguished from those great interests on whose support he has depended, and whose wishes or prejudices he has consulted? For assuredly, neither the King, nor the Church, nor the aristocracy, seriously and sincerely desire these or any other reforms, and only agree to them from necessity. Peel is, I think, right; he has no other alternative. Such is the force and power of public opinion, that no Government can resist it; and if Peel can succeed in restraining and directing it, if he can convert it from a destructive into a conservative element, he will render such a great service as will cancel all the former mischief he has done; but he enters with disadvantage upon a course which implies at the outset the surrender of much of the governing principle of his political life, and in which neither friend nor foe can doubt that the conduct he adopts, however justifiable, necessary, indispensable, is compulsory and unpalatable. A man who is called to the head of affairs must undoubtedly act, not according to any impracticable obstinate theories of his own, but according to the state in which he finds affairs, no matter how produced or by whom; but it is a very different thing to adopt a system reluctantly and under necessity, because somebody else by his incapacity or his misfortune has rendered it indispensable, and to do so after you yourself have brought about this state of things: and such is the false position of Peel with all his Tory associates. This, however, is begging the question in dispute between the two great antagonistic parties. Peel would say that the imprudent concessions and reckless changes of the Whigs have made the difficulty; the Whigs would say that the resistance of the Tories to all moderate and gradual reforms produced the sweeping measure of '31, and the excitement that was partly its cause and partly its consequence. February 17th, 1835 {p.209}