THE THEEE KINGDOMS.

SIR ROBERT PEEL was frequently reproved by his party-friends, while he lived, for his eager wish to merit
posthumous fame. It was said to be little better than the aspiration of a heathen; and on one occasion of his
avowal of it, in connection with his support of mechanics' institutes and reading-rooms for working men at
Tamworth, he was denounced as the confessed disciple of a school of philosophy not accepting Christian principles
as the guide of life. Posthumous fame proves, nevertheless, no un-impressive or un-Christian example to the
generation which profited by Sir Robert Peel's statesmanship, and now deplores his death; nor has any incident in
the general sorrow been more note-worthy than the eager offerings from working men, exhibiting them mindful
of the services and sacrifices of a statesman who had a steady regard for their mental as well as material
welfare, who always upheld the duty of providing them with the means of recreation and manly amusements,
and who would have carried instruction and knowledge, as he had already brought unwonted plenty,
to the humblest homes. Perhaps our age has never given so good a proof of the capacity of good that is in
it, as by this unexampled and all-pervading feeling of regret for Sir Robert Peel. Every class, from the
throne to the cottage, has expressed it; it has not only found a voice in our own but in foreign legislatures;
the most bitter enmities have been laid aside in its presence; and, throughout all the leading cities of
England, there has been but the generous contention of doing most honour to the dead. In no respect more
fitly could have closed a career unusually marked by vicissitudes of opinion and esteem, but veiy generally felt
at length to have been animated by nothing so much as by the common welfare and regard to justice. Nor have
we, in this case, to apply the sarcastic remark of Bacon, that "Good things never appear in their full beauty
till they have turned their backs and are passing away;" for Sir Robert Peel had lived down his detractors,
and become conscious of his reward. His last legislative triumph had cleared up questionable motives in his
previous course; and few candid or intelligent men any longer doubted that his public changes had been a
series of progressive developments prompted by duty, guarded as well as justified by experience, and forming
a character, on the whole, nobly consistent in its apparent inconsistencies. If we would really estimate what
we owe, in the way of moral as well as political example, to the man who began life in the service of the
aristocracy and ended it in that of the people, we have but to contemplate the opposite picture of a people's
advocate closing his career as the champion of aristocratic privilege. Sir Robert Peel's last injunction was
that his children should not receive titles or pensions for any supposed services their  father might have
rendered. Lord Brougham's latest speech was a cry of alarm for the safety of society, should titles, salaries,
or pensions be in the least abated, in number or amount.

The least worthy of these two examples would nevertheless appear to have been followed In the ministerial
proroposition to give twelve thousand a-year to the son of the deceased Duke of Cambridge, irrespective of
any income from his father's savings, or from his own present enjoyment of a colonelcy and prospective hopes
of a field-marshalcy. Homely people are disposed to put this matter in a mathematical form, and to ask, If
the grandsons of a king are now entitled to as much as the sons of a king until now received, What in fairness
should the children of a queen have in future, when their turn for a vote shall come? But an immense
majority of the House of Commons were more eager to give the sum demanded than to discuss its expediency
or justice. They have also persisted in the extravagance of the African blockade; and, in the teeth of proof
that slave exports have more than doubled in amount, and that even the horrors of the middle passage have
been aggravated, during our thirty years' costly experiment against both, have flung away an additional ten
thousand pounds upon the purchase of five miserable Danish forts, for trial of whether a blockade by land
will help our powerless blockade by sea, and whether the command of a hundred and fifty more miles of
pestiferous swamp and jungle will enable us to do what with a sweep of seventeen hundred miles on the same
murderous coast we have hitherto failed to accomplish. Nor has the House of Commons had much hesitation
in renewing the very great present charges for the very distant future advantages of Labuan; though the
senators who have hitherto upheld Sir James Brooke as a model of exalted superiority to all sordid considerations,
must have been somewhat startled by revelations in the debate as to his eager desire for the
"baronetcy" which was supposed to have been forced upon him, his anxiety for the support of the "press"
to which his friends had described him loftily indifferent, his contempt for the "long-eared philanthropy"
which so extravagantly petted him at starting, his denial to the mercantile community of those "generous
and disinterested motives" which on trust they had so freely conceded to himself, and his scorn of the Oxford
"bigots and bookworms"  who glorified him into a D.C.L. when he was last in England. It would trench too
gravely on our space to specify such other questionable outlays as Committees of Supply have voted during
the past month; but it remarkably proves with how much more facility, in matters of this kind, an absurd
custom may be supported, than a rational change can be effected, that the vote of seventeen hundred a year
which began to be voted for the support of three hundred dissenting ministers a century and a quarter ago,
is still carried against the scornful protest of every leading dissenter in the country as well as the House of
Commons, who repudiate such a grant as an insult. It is the same precisely with the Regium Donum in
Ireland. Nor do the majorities which deal thus freely with the public money appear to be more careful of
the manner in which it is got than of that in which it goes; for, of the thirty-five classes of persons subject
to the licensing duty, they selected the other day the attorneys as alone or pre-eminently deserving of