Page:History of the Anti corn law league - Volume 2.pdf/423

 announcement of the Times was substantially true. The cabinet had, on Wednesday, assented to Sir Robert Peel's proposal, that the ports should be opened, and that new financial arrangements, including a repeal of the present Corn Law, should be laid before parliament at its opening. The Duke of Wellington, it was said, had become alarmed at the consequences of the contemplated liberality to which he had given his assent, and he returned to his old obstructive position with a dogged obstinacy that was not to be reasoned with, and some of his colleagues, who were willing to permit a greater degree of commercial liberty, manifested their dislike to be made the instruments of carrying that which they had always opposed. Hence the defeat of Sir Robert Peel, and hence the denunciation in Friday's Standard of the Times' announcement, as "atrocious fabrication." It was understood that, when the premier discovered his inability to move his cabinet onward, he immediately made his position known to Lord John Russell, then in Scotland, who consequently proceeded to London, where he arrived at the time when ministers had departed to Osborne House to tender their resignation to the Queen. On the following day his lordship proceeded to Osborne House, and received instructions from Her Majesty to form a new administration.

The free traders believed that had Sir Robert Peel possessed the courage to choose for himself colleagues to carry out his intended measures, the contest for free trade would be neither so protracted nor so difficult as it would be under ministers who had so many dislikings to overcome that, had he remained in office and shown an honest deter mination to effect the repeal of the Corn Law, he would have had the earnest support of all the free traders in the House and throughout the country: that the whigs, in com mon consistency, would have given their aid to the principles which they had then adopted; that the moderate conservatives would have followed Peel; that although they