“Has Lord John formed his ministry, then?”
“No, I am not sure that he will. I am not thinking of him, I am thinking of Peel.”
“Oh! Of Peel?”
“He has done a fine thing! As every man does who puts what is right before what is easy. May I tell you a story of myself?” the Indian continued. “Some years ago in the Afghan war I was unlucky enough to command a small frontier post. My garrison consisted of two companies and six or seven European officers. The day came when I had to choose between two courses. I must either hold my ground until our people advanced, or I must evacuate the post, which had a certain importance—and fall back into safety. The men never dreamed of retiring. The officers were confident that we could hold out. But we were barely supplied for forty days, and in my judgment no reinforcement was possible under seventy. I made my choice, breached the place, and retired. But I tell you, sir, that the days of that retreat, with sullen faces about me, and hardly a man in my company who did not think me a poltroon, were the bitterest of my life. I knew that if the big-wigs agreed with them I was a ruined man, and after ten years service I should go home disgraced. Fortunately the General saw it as I saw it, and all was well. But—” he looked at Basset with a wry smile—“it was a march of ten days to the base, and to-day the sullen looks of those men come back to me in my dreams.”
“And you think,” Basset said—the other’s story had won his respect—“that Peel has found himself in such a position?”
“To compare great issues with small, I do. I suspect that he has gone through an agony—that is hardly too strong a word—such as I went through. My impression is that when he came into office he was in advance of his party. He saw that the distress in the country called for measures which his followers would accept from no one else. He believed that he could carry them with him. Perhaps, even then, he held a repeal of the Corn Laws possible in some remote future; perhaps he did not, I don’t know. For suddenly there came on him the fear of this Irish famine—and forced his hand.”
“But don’t you think,” Basset asked, “that the alarm is premature?” A dozen times he had heard the famine called a flam, a sham, a bite, anything but a reality.
“You have never seen a famine?” the other replied gravely. “You have never had to face the impossibility of creating food where it does not exist, or of bringing it from a distance when there are no roads. I have had that experience. I have seen people die of starvation by hundreds, women, children, babes, when I could do nothing because steps had not been taken in time. God forbid that that should happen in Ireland! If the fear does not outrun the dearth, God help the poor! Now I am told that Peel witnessed a famine in Ireland about ’17 or ’18, and knows what it is.”
“You have had interesting experiences?”
“The experience of every Indian officer. But the burden which rests on us makes us alive to the difficulties of a statesman’s position. I see Peel forced—forced suddenly, perhaps, to make a choice; to decide whether he shall do what is right or what is consistent. He must betray his friends, or he must betray his country. And the agony of the decision is the greater if he has it burnt in on his memory that he did this thing once before, that once before he turned his back on his party—and that all the world knows!”