THE THREE KINGDOMS.

THE Whig Ministry of 1846 has fallen. It has taken but three weeks of the first session following the death
of Sir Robert Peel to put the policy of that great statesman into apparent peril. It is now that the
country feels in its nearest interests the most deplorable public loss of our time. On the last night when Sir
Robert Peel and Lord John Russell sat together in the House of Commons, the Premier avowed that it
was by Sir Robert's support his Ministry had been sustained through all the perils of '48 and '49. It has not
long survived the loss of those helping offices, of that guiding care.

It is not to be denied that the Ministry has fallen ingloriously. Their budget is a confessed and
melancholy failure. It satisfied no friend, and conciliated no enemy. Without adding anything to the
means of staving off a protectionist policy, it subtracted from the means of carrying out and completing the
commercial policy. It was as little fair as it was generous. Sir Charles Wood even flippantly avowed that
he had chosen to be rather unjust than just, in one part of the assessment proposed under it, because he did
not choose to subject himself to the annoyance which justice would have been sure to occasion him. From
the first moment that this notable plan was propounded, its contemptuous rejection was a matter of
certainty. Men have not made up their minds to be saddled with the Income-tax, and all its inequalities, as
though they were simply beasts of burden. Their reason desires to be satisfied that, in this matter of direct
taxation, they are undergoing the temporary inconvenience for some certain ultimate advantage. It is quite
clear what the course of Sir Robert Peel's reasoning was in the matter. Against every fiscal burden, he
balanced so much expansion of each man's means to bear it. His object was the relief of industry and trade
to the utmost conceivable extent, because he knew that the not distant re-payment from such sources back
to the National Exchequer would be tenfold. No man was more sensible of the claims of the public creditor;
but while duties and imposts still remained to obstruct employment and dishearten enterprise, he would
have ridiculed the folly of flinging a million of surplus to the relief of the National Debt. There are but two
intelligible modes of effecting such relief. There is Mr. Disraeli's for a sinking fund, the outlay of five
millions a year, and re-imposition of the old burdens. There is Sir Robert Peel's for filling the National
Exchequer by unrestricted freedom to National Enterprise. Sir Charles Wood has not had the courage
boldly to encounter either; and he leaves not a man in the state to regret his downfall.

But the truth must be told in this as in other things. Bad as the budget was, it is not the budget by
which Ministers have fallen. Signs and portents appeared within a few days of the meeting of Parliament
which foreboded what has come to pass. The Ecclesiastical Titles Bill, however short of its professed design,
succeeded thoroughly in disaffecting the Irish Roman Catholics; and some twenty Free-traders, bent upon
protecting the Pope, went about it in the Irish fashion of voting for protection to Agriculture. But for
this Mr. Disraeli's minority would have fallen considerably short of last year's. As it was, the policy which
our greatest statesman so recently and solemnly bequeathed to the continued care and support of the House
of Commons, received but the scanty support of a majority of fourteen members of that House. Nobly
did Sir James Graham, however, represent and vindicate his deceased chief; and, in a speech as impressive
and remarkably eloquent as any statesman ever delivered within those walls, warn his old associates on the
Conservative bench, that they might convulse the country, might endanger property, might shake to their
foundations every institution of the State, but that they could not, with the help of any power now existing
in England, permanently enhance by force of law the price of bread. Significantly enough, when the
question which Mr. Disraeli would have passed off for that of merely relieving land of some millions of
taxes, was revived a few nights after in the House of Lords under its older and plainer designation of Protection
to British Industry, Lord Stanley sat ominously silent. He heard Lord Hardwicke first protest that the
manufacturers were thriving on the ruin of every other interest in the country, and then proceed to describe how
these same thriving manufacturers, having multiplied production beyond all reasonable bounds, had utterly
failed to find a market, either here or abroad. Yet the Protectionist leader continued silent. He heard not
only Lord Hardwicke, but Lord Malmesbury and the Duke of Richmond, threaten a coming invasion of
French industry more appalling than French cannon or steel; and still said not a word. Probably he had
better reasons for remaining silent when Lord Wodehouse rose, and, in one of the neatest and best arguments
ever delivered on the question, put the simple truth before his fellow peers. He disposed of Mr. Disraeli's
debate in the half-dozen words in which he said that the interest of each class of the community was
dependent on the general prosperity of the country, and that particular interests could never be consulted or
preferred except to the detriment of the rest. He reminded the House that traders both in silk and cotton
had formerly clamoured for restriction to save them from ruin, just as loudly as the farmers were clamouring
now; and he asked whether cultivators of the soil were to be the only class in the realm incapable of
overcoming their difficulties without help from the public purse, modified as those difficulties were from day to
day by infinite circumstances, and by the prominent and permanent fact that for British agricultural produce
there was the best market in the world, that of domestic consumption. He overthrew Mr. Disraeli's statistics
by acutely separating the agricultural from the non-agricultural land subject to parochial taxation, and by
showing that the former represented but forty-five per cent, of the whole. He declared that such had been