"Bob, you dog, if you're not Prime Minister, I'll disinherit you." That, we are told, was the way in which the father of Sir Robert Peel stimulated the political ambitions of his son. He became Prime Minister, and is not likely soon to be forgotten. His Corn Importation Bill is one of the pieces of legislation which mark an epoch. In London, too, he will be remembered for his creation of the present police system. Possibly there are many now who, hearing a police constable called a "peeler," forget that the name carries us back to the remodelling of the London police by Mr. Peel in the year 1829.
BISHOP HOOPER'S MONUMENT.
(Photo: Cassell and Co., Ltd.)
The same month may speak to us of a statesman who helped to bring the nation through a crisis of another kind. On the last day of February, 1856, Lord Canning disembarked at Calcutta, and within five minutes after touching land proceeded to take the customary oaths as Governor-General of India. It fell upon him to deal with so appalling a crisis as the Indian Mutiny; he met it, as one of his biographers reminds us, in a way that "places him high on the list of those great officers of State whose services to their country entitle them to the esteem and gratitude of every loyal Englishman."
February is not a great month in ecclesiastical anniversaries. But it was on February 9th, 1555, that John Hooper, Bishop of Gloucester, was burnt just outside his cathedral, where a monument to his memory now stands. It was in this month that Robert Leighton, sometime Archbishop of Glasgow, died in London in the year 1684. His commentary on the Epistles of St. Peter is still numbered amongst standard homiletical and expository works.
BISHOP PATTESON.
(From the Portrait in the British Museum.)
February has some pathetic associations with the foreign missionary work of the English Church. It was on February 24th, 1861, that J. C. Patteson was consecrated at Auckland first Bishop for Melanesia. The story of his martyrdom is one of the most moving incidents in the history of modern missions. His successor, J. R. Selwyn, was consecrated in the same month in 1877.