Page:Notes on the Anti-Corn Law Struggle.djvu/40

 admitted; and that, having paid for the article, they were not properly credited with what they had done.

They knew perfectly well that the fund was enormous when the famine broke out in Ireland, and that Peel surrendered from fear of the agitation being continued more fiercely than ever in consequence of the famine; and not ten men in a thousand believed the cock-and-bull story of his having been converted by Cobden's "unadorned eloquence," and that too after Cobden's very earnest and argumentative speaking had almost ceased, which it had done in the middle of 1845, two months before the Irish famine.

And what influenced Peel as much as anything was that the farmers were getting discontented, and, whatever they might think of the Manchester school, were coming over to the opinion that they had been deceived by the parliamentary protection promised them.

Of the dependence to be placed on fluency of words, or eloquence, when anything difficult is to be done, an idea may be obtained from what has been said by the most eloquent writer and one of the most eloquent speakers of his time. Lord Macaulay, in the ninth chapter of his History of