Between the maintenance of the Corn Laws inviolate and a measure involving their ultimate repeal, I saw no middle course satisfactory or advantageous to any interest; I saw still less of satisfaction or advantage in indecision and irrational delay. I could not admit the incompetency of the present Parliament to deal with this as with every other question of public concern. There appeared to me, upon the whole, much less of public evil in the resolution finally to adjust the question of the Corn Laws than in any other that could be then adopted; and that being my deliberate conviction, I felt it to be my duty to incur the painful sacrifices which the acting upon that conviction must inevitably entail.
LORD J. RUSSELL QUICKENS THE PACE (1845).
Source.—Memoirs by Sir R. Peel, vol. ii., p. 175. (London: 1858.)
To the Electors of the City of London.
Gentlemen,
The present state of the country in regard to its supply of food cannot be viewed without apprehension. Forethought and bold precaution may avert any serious evils—indecision and procrastination may produce a state of suffering which it is frightful to contemplate.
Three weeks ago it was generally expected that Parliament would be immediately called together. The announcement that Ministers were prepared at that time to advise the Crown to summon Parliament, and to propose on their first meeting a suspension of the import duties on corn, would have caused orders at once to be sent to various parts of Europe and America for the purchase and transmission of grain for the consumption of the United Kingdom. An Order in Council dispensing with the law was neither necessary nor desirable. No party in Parliament would have made itself responsible for the destruction of a measure so urgent and so beneficial.
The Queen’s Ministers have met and separated without affording us any promise of such seasonable relief.
It becomes us, therefore, the Queen’s subjects, to consider how we can best avert, or at all events mitigate, calamities of no ordinary magnitude.