[6] Vivian's Cornish petition was signed by 2,100 or 2,200 freeholders, the same number who had voted for him at the election, but of these there were 200 who had voted for Eliot. [Page Head: POLICY OF SIR ROBERT PEEL.] The circumstances which enable them to go on at all I take to be these: the extreme repugnance of the Queen to any change, and the necessity in which Melbourne finds himself on her account to go on as long as he possibly can; and on the other hand, the reluctance of Peel to assault the Government in front. I know no more of Peel's opinions and designs than what I can gather from his conduct and what he is likely to entertain under present circumstances; but it must be his object to delay coming into office till he can do so as a powerful Minister, and till it is made manifest to Parliament and the country that he is demanded by a great public exigency, and is not marching in as the result of a party triumph. If the resignation of the present Government should take place under any circumstances which admitted of a reunion of the Whigs and the Radicals, and of the whole re-united party being held together in opposition to a Conservative Government, Peel would be little more secure, and not more able to act with efficiency and independence than he was in 1835, and this is what he never will submit to. It is also a great object to him that the Irish questions should be settled before he comes into office. Nothing would gladden his heart more than to have the Government in Ireland established on a footing from the practice of which he could not deviate, and that once effected up to a certain point (as far as the Whigs can go) he would be enabled to go a good deal farther; and as the man who covers in a building has always more credit and is considered the artificer more than he who lays the foundations, so Peel would obtain all the credit of measures which would in fact have been rendered easy or practicable by the long-continued toils and perseverance of others. His interest therefore (and consequently I suppose his design) is to restrain the impatience of his followers; to let the Government lose ground in public estimation gently and considerately, not violently and rancorously; to assist in putting them in a contemptible or inefficient point of view; to render their places as uneasy as possible; and to give them time to crumble to pieces, so that his return to power may be more in appearance the act of the Whig Ministry than any act of his own. Then he may demand, and would probably obtain, as the condition of his acceptance of office, the support of a large proportion of the moderate of the Whig party, and the necessity of conciliating such men and of acquiring their support could afford him an excuse for adopting those Liberal maxims which, though far from palatable to the Conservatives, would be indispensable to the formation of a strong Government, as without their adoption no