A few days after the Session opened, Sir Robert Peel, in explaining his plan for getting rid of the Corn duties, made it clear that Repeal was to be total, but not immediate. Writing to Mrs. Cobden on the 28th of January, Cobden says:--“Peel is at last delivered, but I hardly know whether to call it a boy or a girl. Something between the two, I believe. His Corn measure makes an end of all Corn laws in 1849, and in the meantime it is virtually a fixed duty of 4s. He has done more than was expected of him, and all but the right thing.” As a matter of fact, there was to be a sliding scale till 1849, the maximum duty being 10s. when wheat was under 48s. a quarter, and the minimum duty being 4s. when wheat was 54s. a quarter. On the 2nd of March, when the House went into Committee on the resolution, Mr. Villiers’ amendment, insisting on immediate, as well as total, Repeal, was lost by a large majority, and on the 11th of May the Corn Bill reached the third reading. The debate lasted three nights, and at 4 a.m. on the 16th it was passed by a majority of 98 in a House of 516. Before tracing the subsequent stages of this controversy, it may not be amiss to allude to one of the most curious incidents that marked its progress. On the 27th of January, when Sir Robert Peel’s resolutions embodying his financial policy came before the House of Commons, the presence of Prince Albert in the gallery, as a spectator of the scene, roused the jealousy and wrath of the Tories. Lord George Bentinck, in the course of the debate, waved his hand excitedly towards his Royal Highness, and accused him of being “seduced by the First Minister of the Crown to come down to this House to usher in, to give _éclat_, and, as it were, by reflection from the Queen, to give the semblance of a personal sanction of her Majesty to a measure which, be it for good or evil, a great majority at least of the landed, aristocracy of England, of Scotland, and of Ireland, imagine fraught with deep injury, if not ruin, to them.” This was an insinuation at once ridiculous and unjust. The truth is that the Queen, from her girlhood, has had a somewhat exaggerated idea of the instructive value of Parliamentary debates. She is to this day an ardent student of all Parliamentary reports. She has the true Parliamentary instinct peculiar to England and English-speaking communities which leads them to take a strange but genuine delight in Parliamentary discussion. Indeed, she has been known to tell her Ministers not only what she thought of a particular debate, but how she herself would have handled the subject-matter of it had she been a member of the House of Commons; in fact, it was in replying to a communication of this kind that Lord Palmerston once observed, in the felicitous vein of a courtier, that it was a lucky thing for Ministers who had the misfortune to differ from her Majesty, that they had not to answer her arguments in Parliament. Under the influence of these ideas,