asked, who having, as he had boasted, served four sovereigns, was finally compelled, by the observations of the last three years, to change his opinion on a subject which had been discussed in his hearing from every conceivable point of view during a quarter of a century? He likened him to the Capitan Pasha of the Sultan, who, on the plea that he hated a war, ended it by going over to the enemy, and betraying his Imperial master. Peel’s speech, said Mr. Disraeli, was “a glorious example of egotistical rhetoric.” He was “no more a great statesman than a man who got up behind a carriage was a great whip. Both were anxious for progress, and both wanted a good place.” It was a brilliant, dazzling, witty harangue, and it caught the humour, not of the betrayed Protectionists merely, but to some extent of the House also. Looking back on Peel’s speech now, one can detect a false note in it. Dr. Samuel Wilberforce, Bishop of Oxford, who went to hear the debate, in a letter to Miss Noel, says that the Prime Minister’s statement was received with “a kind of thundering sullenness.”[37] He unconsciously irritated the House by his assumption that the case for the Corn Laws must needs fall after he had personally put the matter to the test of a three years’ [Illustration: ST. STEPHEN’S CLOISTERS, WESTMINSTER HALL.] experiment. It lessened the grace of his submission to events and facts, when he argued as if the observations and experiments and researches of all the greatest economists in the world during a score of years were not in any sense conclusive till verified by Sir Robert Peel. And all through the debates, it is quite clear that he contrived to embitter his opponents by seeming to talk down to them. His tone was that of one who thought they were rather to be pitied than blamed, because they could not understand that if three years had sufficed to change the opinion of their leader, three minutes ought to suffice for the conversion of his followers. One crisis and one set of circumstances hardly convinced men, whose class interests were at stake, that Protection was wrong, especially after Sir Robert [Illustration: LORD STANLEY (AFTERWARDS FOURTEENTH EARL OF DERBY).] Peel himself had taught them to disregard the experience of a quarter of a century. Peel, when he showed how keenly he felt Mr. Disraeli’s sarcasms, failed to remember that the arrows which stung him came from his own quiver.