And if once he return, think not that he will easily be dispossessed of it. He will well know how to play the part of the popular favourite. There stands not in the House a more thorough Radical than the inner man of Sir Robert Peel. It is from him that we shall obtain Extended Suffrage, finally to become Universal. It is from him that we shall obtain the diminution, and at last the abolition of Church Establishments. It is from him, or from such as he, that we may hope finally to obtain a Republic. You may smile, and think such a prospect absurd. Would you have thought it more absurd, if I had told you three years ago that from him we should have obtained Repeal of the Corn Laws? Depend upon it, we shall yet see the day when Sir Robert shall be the triumphant popular minister.
Heaven forbid! thought I; yet I was forced to confess that it did not seem unlikely. I could, however, by no means join in the admiration which my friend expressed for such a character. While granting that some respect might be felt for the skilful δημαγωγός, who leads and sways the popular mind, I could feel nothing but contempt for the servile δημοπηδός, who merely watches and follows it. I rallied him somewhat upon the magnanimous liberality, which could ally itself with so poor and ungenerous a character, so debased, if his account were true, by meanness, duplicity, and hypocrisy. My Radical waxed somewhat warm, and at length he parted, in all the dignity of his liberality, thinking me a young fool; while I returned, laughing at his generous patriotism, and thinking him a servile-minded old humbug.[15]
The more, however, I pondered on the subject, the more did I see the justice of his views on Peel’s character, and at length I almost entirely coincided with him,—in every thing but his admiration.
What then shall we say of these principles, looking at them under their moral aspect? Taking his admirer’s view, I know not how they could escape the severest censure. But though these admirers of his make no scruple in adopting this view, and even in warmly defending it, we cannot but hesitate to follow their example. An insincerity so deliberate, so calculated, is more than we can readily admit. No doubt, his actual conduct has been such as my friend above described, as facts sufficiently show. No doubt, he has professed one set of principles when seeking power, and another when in possession of it. No doubt, he has used the aristocratical element as his stepping-stone to greatness, and has afterwards kicked it over for the popular one as its support. But we think that these principles have acted in a great measure spontaneously, without any very fixed and deliberate plan in his own mind. We take his conduct to have been not so much the result of calculation, as of the peculiar organisation of his nature. We believe him to have been in a great measure unconscious of the inherent servility and flexibility of his convictions. When he opposed a measure, he probably imagined that he did so chiefly on its own merits, and was not aware that his conversion would inevitably take place, as soon as public opinion was ripe for that measure.
Let us, however, listen to himself, and see what light we can derive from his own lips as to the nature of his principles. By his own account, in the case of the Corn Laws, the suppression of his real opinions lasted for somewhere about three years. “About three years ago,” says he, “a great change took place in my opinions on the subject;” but it seems that for the public good, he thought it best to allow people to deceive themselves, and therefore carefully suppressed all intimation of this change. So far, then, his own account tallies with that of his admirer, and we have his own word that his insincerity, for a considerable period of time, was deliberate and calculated. But the actual duration of this hypocrisy it must evidently be impossible to determine with accuracy; for if a person can, by his own avowal, practise it knowingly and deliberately for three years, it is probable that in a vague and unconscious way, not thoroughly known even to himself, he has been indulging in it for a much longer period.
Again, with respect to his Whig principles, it is impossible to determine accurately how long they have been suppressed, and he has not favoured us on this point with much specific information; but it would appear that they latently existed at the time that he so strenuously opposed that government, and that the germ of Whiggery was developing itself in his bosom, while outwardly he was shining as a high Tory.
With respect to the Catholic Question he is more communicative, and he takes care to inform us, in a speech revised by his own hand, and published for the benefit of posterity in Hansard, that here, too, his duplicity had been of long standing, and very much of a deliberate and premeditated nature. When proposing, as Minister, the measure of Catholic Emancipation, which outwardly he had so long opposed, he reports himself to have said, “So far as my own course in this question is concerned, it is the same with that which suggested itself to my mind in the year 1825, when I was his Majesty’s Principal Minister for the Home Department, and found myself in a minority in this House on this [the Catholic] Question.”[16] Now, the course which he was then pursuing was that of openly advocating and supporting the Catholic claims. And the same course, he tells us, (that, therefore, we must conclude, of his advocating these claims,) suggested itself to his mind in 1825. His duplicity then was of long standing; for he did not, as is well known, suffer the public to be in the least aware of any such suggestion, from the time when it presented itself to his mind in 1825, till 1829, when he first avowed that favourable leaning to those claims, which had so long lain dormant in the interior of his breast. His conduct certainly was well calculated to prevent any suspicion of the existence of such a tendency in his mind; for in 1827, two years after the suggestion had offered itself, he declared himself compelled, by a painful but rigorous sense of duty, to quit Canning’s ministry, and join the opposition against that statesman, on account of his own deep repugnance to those claims, and his conviction of their ruinous tendency. Nay, more, he suffered himself to be borne into power for the ostensible purpose of resisting those claims, and made the round of the country amid the acclamations of his supporters, as Protestant champion, without giving the slightest hint of the suggestion which the minority in 1825 had awakened in his mind, and which was so shortly to develop itself in full force, as soon as he was seated in power.
If, then, we are to believe his own account, his hypocrisy in this matter must have been of considerable duration, of much skill, and consummate perfidy. Though a feat of his earlier prime, it must have been quite worthy to compare with the recent great exploit of his maturity.
The speech from which we have extracted the above passage, is the same which gave rise to the discussion in Parliament, in which Sir Robert’s conduct in this business was attacked. He then endeavoured to rebut the charges founded on it, by denying the authenticity of the expressions attributed to him, some of which rested only on the isolated reports of particular newspapers.[17] But the sentence above quoted stands at full length in his own corrected report in Hansard, revised, as its title tells us, by Mr. Secretary Peel, the authenticity of which has never been questioned. And certainly its natural sense would lead us to conclude, that he was ready, in the interior of his mind, in 1825, to embrace the cause of Catholic Emancipation. If, as he would fain demonstrate, it has a contrary meaning, it can be only, we presume, when taken in some non-natural sense;—the fixing of which we leave to those more conversant than ourselves with that very ingenious mode of interpretation.
And if it be true that he did feel so disposed, that he was “almost persuaded,” at that early period, of the wisdom of granting the Catholic claims, then his subsequent behaviour in putting himself at the head of the party who unflinchingly and undoubtingly opposed those claims, as injurious to the country, his professing to coincide fully in their views, and his obtaining power on the strength of those professions, cannot but be looked on as a political manœuvre of the most disingenuous and culpable kind.