when an unanimous opinion was pronounced, that he was equally liable with the person of sane mind.

Lady Peel was made very ill by the terrible event of January; and the habitual equanimity of Sir Robert himself underwent some disturbance. This was seen on the 16th of February, during the debate on Lord Howick’s motion for a Committee of the whole House to consider the reference in the Queen’s Speech at the opening of Parliament (February 2nd) to the long-continued depression of manufacturing industry. In the course of the discussion, Mr. Cobden said that he held Sir Robert Peel personally responsible for the existing lamentable and dangerous state of affairs. The words were not well chosen; but the Premier, who was out of health at the time, and suffering from anxiety and sorrow, passionately leapt to the conclusion that Mr. Cobden was uttering a thinly-veiled incentive to his assassination. The distinguished Free Trader denied the imputation, received a direct contradiction from his adversary, and ultimately explained, in the midst of great confusion, that what he meant was that the right honourable Baronet was responsible by virtue of his office. The time was one of abnormal excitement, and great allowance must be made both for Peel and Cobden, but especially for the former. Only a few weeks later, Mr. Goulburn, the Chancellor of the Exchequer, applied at Bow Street Police Office for a warrant to arrest a retired officer of the navy, who had threatened to shoot him.

The unsettled condition of the country was shown by some disturbances which occurred about this time in South Wales. The small farmers in that portion of the Principality complained much of the heavy road-taxes which had been recently imposed. The tolls were often so onerous as to absorb the profit arising from the commodities which these humble people took to market. A number of gates had been set up, which were generally believed to be beyond the provisions of the law; and as these were destroyed with impunity, many people resolved to make a crusade against all toll-gates, wheresoever they might be found. In a wild and thinly-peopled country like Wales, authority is necessarily weak; and the conspirators against the gates were able to carry out their projects with less interference than would have been encountered in many other parts of the island. But it was considered advisable that these operations should take place after dark, and the winter of 1842-3 was rendered memorable by a series of successful attacks upon the toll-bars, attended by circumstances which were at once picturesque and alarming. The leader of the movement called himself “Rebecca,” from a strange misapplication of a passage in Genesis, and dressed himself in women’s clothes. Several of his followers were similarly disguised, and those who preserved their proper character as men wore masks over their faces. In the middle of the night the toll-keepers were aroused by a disorderly mob, armed with guns, and bearing torches, saws, and hatchets. Not only were the gates cut down and thrown on the adjacent land, but the toll-houses also were destroyed, and the occupants obliged to finish their night’s rest, if they could finish it at all, in the open field, or on the bleak hill-side. So general was the support given to these rioters that the police and soldiery were frequently baffled in their endeavours to come up with them. But at first no personal outrages were committed. Unfortunately, however, a much worse spirit afterwards set in. Some Chartist emissaries were sent into South Wales; political ideas, having reference to the abolition of tithes, of Church rates, and of the existing Poor Law, were mixed up with the original objects of the association; and in the autumn of 1843 incendiarism and murder marked the progress of this disorderly band. At the same period, however, the gang were severely handled by the military; and when some exemplary punishments had been passed upon the principal rioters, a more lawful state of mind began to set in. The Government, on the other hand, showed a disposition to leniency, and in the following year an amended Turnpike Act for South Wales removed the grievances which had been the original excuse for the outbreak.

The greatest sufferers are usually silent; it is others who discover their miseries, bring them into the light of day, and procure their amendment. Such was the case with the workers in mines and collieries, an inquiry into whose state was conducted by a Commission, whose report was published in the early part of 1842. It appeared from this report that, in some of the coal-mines, women and girls were employed as beasts of burden. By means of a chain passing between the legs, and connected with a belt strapped round their waists, they were compelled to drag to and fro, on hands and knees, and often for fourteen or sixteen hours a day, trucks heavily laden with coal, through passages too low to permit of these persons going upright. They were nearly naked, their clothing consisting of nothing more than a pair of trousers made of sacking. Their bodies were encrusted with the grime of the coal-dust, and many were completely unsexed, and presented chests that were as flat as those of men. By far the greater part of their lives was passed underground, in the black and cavernous recesses of the mine; and the morality of these unhappy creatures was equal to their physical degradation. Children were also employed, and treated with even greater brutality. Overworked and beaten by their cruel taskmasters, these children grew up stunted and diseased, and it was evident that nothing but widespread ruin, both of body and soul, could result from a system so monstrously opposed to all the laws of nature. The statesman who procured the Commission of Inquiry was Lord Ashley, afterwards still more famous as Earl of Shaftesbury; and it was he who subsequently introduced and carried the Mines and Collieries Act, by which women and girls were forbidden to be employed in any form of mining or colliery labour, and the employment of boys was not to be permitted under the age of ten years. Moreover, the term of apprenticeship was limited, and the Secretary of State was empowered to appoint Inspectors of Mines and Collieries, that the provisions of the Bill should not be evaded by those interested in defeating them. The Act was passed in 1842, but did not come into operation until 1843. Its effect was unquestionably good; yet it was found difficult to restrain many women from continuing the work to which they had been accustomed, and which perhaps they could not readily exchange for anything better. The Mines and Collieries Act was a measure in which we may be certain that the Queen, as a woman and a mother, took the deepest interest, and it is equally beyond question that the benevolent and clear-seeing mind of Prince Albert was also enlisted on behalf of sufferers of so peculiar and helpless an order.

It was at this time that great attention began to be paid to social as apart from political questions. Lord Ashley devoted a good deal of pains to effecting a limitation of the daily labour of women and young persons in factories. He ultimately obtained from the Government, in 1844, a Factories Act which threw some protection around children who had previously been employed to an extent, and for a number of successive hours, terribly injurious to their physical and moral health. It was the desire of Sir James Graham, the Home Secretary, to engraft upon this Bill certain provisions for the education of young persons engaged in the large manufacturing establishments of the country; but, owing to the opposition of the Dissenters, who feared that the influence of the Church would be unduly extended, it was found necessary to abandon the proposed clauses. Even with respect to the main objects of the Bill, there was considerable opposition; for the bigoted adherents of political economy would not tolerate a measure which interfered with what they regarded as the right of contract between the employers and the employed. Their principle was doubtless a good one in the main; but children are so much under the influence of others that some departure from the rule was necessary in their case, especially as it was well known that the evil and the suffering were great. The more bitter opponents of Lord Ashley argued that he ought to look nearer home; that the peasantry on his father’s estates, to which in due course he would succeed, were in a worse condition than the female and juvenile operatives in the factories; that the aristocratic reformer knew nothing about manufacturing life; and that in truth there was not much to complain of. But the fact that the agricultural labourers on the lands of Lord Ashley’s father were poor and miserable, was no reason why Lord Ashley should not interest himself in another class of sufferers; while, as to the condition of the children in the seats of manufacturing industry, there could be no question, to any impartial mind, that it was such as to render the interposition of the law imperatively necessary. The general principle has since been extended in many other Acts of Parliament, even to the protection of women; and the bitter opposition of former times has become less and less. It is now admitted that special circumstances call for special legislation; that care for the young has even yet been insufficiently carried out; and that to sacrifice tender lives to economical theories is little better than to repeat in another form the Hindoo worship of Juggernaut. Some slight extension of the time devoted to education was introduced into the Act of 1844, in place of the more complete provision which it was originally intended to make; and the effect of this arrangement was found to be good, though a still further application of the system would unquestionably have been better.

As the session of 1843 advanced, the Queen and Prince Albert conceived a yet higher opinion of the great qualities exhibited by Sir Robert Peel. Her Majesty described him to the King of the Belgians as “a man who thinks but little of party, and never of himself.” The Prince, with his remarkable keenness of judgment, anticipated that it would not be long ere Peel would quit the Conservative party, or the Conservatives, in the main, would desert him. In a Memorandum of Mr. Anson’s, dated April 30th, 1843, we read:—“The Prince said yesterday, that Sir Robert Peel was certainly far from popular with the Conservative party. He, for his part, had the greater confidence in Sir Robert for the very cause to which he attributed the want of confidence with which his party regarded him. It was that Sir Robert was determined to adopt his own line, and not to be turned aside by the fear of making political enemies, or losing support. He was determined either to stand or fall by his own opinion; and the Prince felt that in such a man’s hands the interests of the Crown were most secure.” In little more than three years it was seen that Peel did in truth “fall” by devotion to what he considered necessary to the well-being of the

WESTMINSTER HALL.

country. By his conversion to Free Trade he lost the support of the Conservative party, and was expelled from office by a combination which placed him at a hopeless disadvantage. That he would once more have risen to the head of affairs, had not an accident cut short his life, cannot be doubted; but, with the change of Ministry in 1846, his official existence came to a close.