Of the father of the late Sir Robert Peel we are told, that "he was the son of Robert Peel, a manufacturer of humble pretensions and small fortune, who died in 1736, leaving little more to his son than his good name and an unsullied reputation.'

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"From his boyish days," we are told, he was impressed with the idea that he should accumulate great riches, and become the founder of a family;” a notion to which he did not hesitate to give frequent utterance, so as to provoke the sneers of some of the elder members of his family, who little dreamed that they themselves should largely profit by what they regarded as a very ridiculous delusion.

The truth is, he was "a man of hope, and forward-looking mind,” of energetic perseverance and industry, and great practical shrewdness. He foresaw, in posse, the capabilities of the power-loom, and rightly judged that the machinery then in use was susceptible of improvements by which human labour might be vastly abridged, and the raw material turned into a merchantable commodity which would find remunerating prices in all the markets of the world. Nor was his sagacity at fault. Every year brought confirmation of the truth of his vaticinations, until England became the great emporium of the cotton trade, and he himself, as well he deserved to be, one of the most flourishing of those manufacturing and merchant princes of whom the empire may so well be proud, and whose affluence is not greater than the largeness of soul which makes it redound in blessings to all around them.

We find him, in 1773, at the age of three-and-twenty, conducting, in partnership with Mr. Yates of Bury, in Lancashire, an extensive cotton manufactory, and enjoying a career of uninterrupted prosperity for ten years ; after which time he married his partner's daughter. He soon found his gains by trade equal to the purchase of some extensive estates in Lancashire, Staffordshire, and Warwickshire.

Nor did he confine his attention entirely to matters of trade. The state of the finances and of national credit engaged a large share of his attention. A pamphlet of his, intended to dispel the gloomy apprehensions which seemed to have possessed the public, from the great increase of the national debt at the close of the American war, deserved and obtained considerable circulation. His object was to prove, by showing the difference between public and private engagements, that "the national debt" was "productive of national prosperity." We cannot here dwell upon this part of the subject further than to say, that in Mr. Peel's pamphlet there was much that was plausible, and something that was true; that the end aimed at was, to a considerable extent, attained, by cheering many to bear up under the public burdens; and that when he became a member of parliament he was regarded, even by the aristocratic assembly which then represented the Commons of England, with marked respect, as one to whose practical wisdom great deference should be paid in all our financial and mercantile arrangements.

Not only was he an able and enterprising tradesman and a useful senator, but he was a man of princely munificence. When the public credit was low, during the crisis of the revolu tionary war, the free-will offering of his house was ten thousand pounds. This was in 1797, when we were threatened with invasion.

A living on his estate, in the gift of the Chancellor, becoming vacant, he solicited it, with every prospect of success, for a very worthy clergyman of his acquaintance. But the seals were suddenly transferred to other hands, and his reasonable expectations were disappointed. He, however, was resolved that his friend should not be disappointed, and he immediately purchased for him another living of equal value.

A rival house, of the first class in the cotton trade, having become, by

injudicious speculation, severely embarrassed, was upon the verge of bankruptcy, from which nothing could have saved it, had not a rumour of the fact reached Sir Robert, who, with a delicacy equal to his generosity, secretly advanced to the heads of the firm more than fourteen thousand pounds, by which timely aid the calamitous resu't was averted.

Another house, consisting of two sons and three daughters, whose property was embarked in trade, was suddenly reduced to a complete wreck. The large-hearted baronet immediately set himself about obtaining lucrative employments for the sons, which his parliamentary influence enabled him to do; and presented each of the daughters with a sum of one thousand pounds. May we not say to all overgrown capitalists, "Go, and do likewise,"

Well might the late Sir Robert have been proud of such a father.

And that father was proud of his son. He was an idolator of Pitt, as "the statesman who weathered the storm;" and his highest aspirations after earthly happiness were, that his son should tread in the steps of that illustrious man; and, if the day of adverse vicissitude should come, be a stay to a menaced and a sinking country in its hour of adversity and tribulation. How far they were gratified the sequel will show.

The late Sir Robert was born at Bury, in Lancashire, on the 5th of February, 1788, being Shrove Tuesday; on which account he went during his childhood, amongst the numerous workmen of his father, by the whimsical soubriquet of "Pancake Bob."

When of a proper age he was placed at Harrow School, and was a cotemporary with Lord Byron in that establishment, where an intimacy commenced which was only terminated by the death of that distinguished man.

From Harrow he went to Christ Church, Oxford, where he distinguished himself by his quickness and diligence, both in science and classics, and took, at commencement, a double first-class degree.

He was now to enter upon the great theatre of public life; and he took his seat in parliament, at the age of twenty-one, in the year 1809, as representative of the borough of Cashel in Ireland.

Pitt and Fox were gone. These

great leaders had called around them— the one upon the anti-revolutionary, the other upon the revolutionary side— whatever of vigour or ability, either within parliament or without, championed the respective causes of reckless change, or of social order; and they departed, leaving for successors Lords Grey and Grenville, on the one hand, and Canning and Castlereagh on the other.

The two last able men were not at unity among themselves. Canning was brilliant and popular; Castlereagh solid, high-spirited, and serviceable. Both had been pupils of Pitt, and, had the master lived, they would have each contentedly occupied the posts he assigned to them, without the bickerings and jealousies which now arose to interrupt the continuity of their offcial connexion. But soon symptoms unmistakeable manifested themselves, which evinced that they could no longer serve in the same cabinet, and the quarrel, which blazed forth in a duel, deprived them both of public employ

ment.

This constituted a crisis in the Government, and Mr. Percival sought to strengthen his hands by the accession of Lords Grey and Grenville; but these noblemen could not then be induced to take office; and it was under the auspices of the cabinet of which Lord Camden was President of the Council, and Mr. Percival First Lord of the Treasury and Chancellor of the Exchequer, that the young member for Cashel made his parliamentary debut, as seconder to the address in answer to the speech from the throne, which was moved by Lord Bernard.

In this he acquitted himself creditably; so much so as not only to gratify parental pride, but to draw the marked attention of those who were best qualified to judge of rising eminence, and who did not hesitate to intimate their opinion that he would one day occupy a prominent position in the councils of the empire.

Nor was he long without office. His aptitude for business soon pointed him out to Mr. Percival as one well fitted to fill creditably the post of Under Secretary of State to the Colonial Department, the seals of which were then held by the Earl of Liverpool. And thus, when scarcely of an age which qualified him to sit and vote in the Legislature, he became a member of the adminis

tration of the day, and had the active duties of a very important department cast upon him."*

His first appointment was important, as it may have led to his second. When Lord Liverpool, after the assassination of Mr. Percival, became the head of the Government, Mr. Peel, whose character and capabilities became known to the Premier from official connexion, was selected to fill the very important and responsible office of Chief Secretary for Ireland.

Ireland was then governed upon Protestant principles. The Test and Corporation Acts and the disabling statutes were then in force; and Mr. Peel entered upon his Irish administration with a firmly-expressed determination to keep the state of the law in these respects as he found it.

The Constitution, he saw, was both civil and ecclesiastical. Any tampering with the laws which guaranteed the security of the succession, or the inviolability of the Church, he regarded as fatal to public liberty; and accordingly, from the moment of his acceptance of office in Ireland, he proclaimed himself the most strenuous and determined opponent of what was called "Catholic Emancipation."

He had come into office under Percival. That distinguished man was, for a season, his political Mentor; and it was but natural that he should incline to the strong opinions which his guide and patron always expressed upon the subject of removing restraints which he deemed absolutely indispensable to the preservation of our constitutional monarchy, as established at the Revolution. But there can be no doubt that, as soon as he was removed, the young politician began to look at that and other matters with different eyes; and although he felt himself committed to the support of the Protestant cause, and did support it for some time with unflinching energy, it would not be difficult to find, in the strongest of his antiemancipation speeches, passages which clearly intimated that he was not a very inveterate exclusionist, and that if any great and present tangible good could be confidently calculated upon by the removal of the disabilities, he at least would not be found very long amongst

those by whom it would be very strenuously resisted.

The truth is, that with the strong reasons against such removal he was very superficially acquainted. He had not studied the subject as it was studied by Flood, by Saurin, or by Lord Clare. He did not know how deeply the most inveterate dogmas of Popery had fixed themselves in the minds, and poisoned the hearts, of a vast majority of the Romish population. He conceived that the isolation in which they had been kept, and not the traditions of their Church and the spirit of their religion, had engendered that bitter anti-anglicism, and hatred of the Established Church, which, from time to time, blazed out into outrage and sedition; and the conviction was more and more growing upon him, that, remove the cause, and the effects must cease-repeal the penal code, and you will have tranquillity and prosperity in Ireland.

His task, therefore, was a difficult one. He had to maintain what was called the Protestant interest, with a conviction that, sooner or later, that interest must be abandoned.

But there was another question which more entirely engrossed his attention, and the mature consideration of which led to a change of opinion which, until it was actually announced, and embodied in an Act of Parliament, could, by no sagacity, have been suspected. When, in 1811, Mr. Horner introduced his resolutions for returning to a metallic currency, he had no more strenuous antagonist than Mr. Peel. That gifted man contemplated the derangements in our monetary system with pained and anxious anticipations of evil, and deemed that nothing short of a return to cash payments could remedy that depreciation of the paper currency, and that unfavourable balance of the exchanges which resulted, as he maintained, from the Suspension Act of '97. We do not mean, indeed in such a paper as this we could not venture, to enter into a full discussion of that much-vexed question; but no doubt can be entertained that Mr. Horner's statements and reasonings were lucid and forcible in no common degree, and carried a conviction to the minds of thousands, that the measures which he

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recommended were sound and good, and that the wisdom of parliament would best be shown in their entire and speedy adoption. Not so Mr. Peel, or his venerable and sagacious father. They maintained that no suf ficient grounds were shown, either in the state of the exchanges, or the depreciation of the bank-note, for the resolutions upon which Mr. Horner proposed to found his bill. They referred to various periods when the variations in the exchanges were quite as striking, and when no such cause could be pretended. They alluded forcibly to the effect which a return to cash payments must have upon the magnitude of the national debt; how injuriously it must affect all debtors, while, in a corresponding degree, it must benefit all creditors. And they were able to persuade the house and the country, that whatever were the present inconveniences they had to endure, they were as nothing compared to the evils in prospect, if, from any hallucination of the political economists, the resolutions of Mr. Horner were agreed to; and that it was far better to bear the ills they had, than fly to others which they knew not of." Such were the opinions of Mr. Peel in 1811; and such they continued to be (at least there was no outward or visible sign to the contrary) until 1819, when he was appointed chairman of a committee to investigate and report upon the state of the currency. He entered upon his laborious duties with his accustomed diligence and energy, bringing all his financial knowledge and experience to bear upon the case before him; and it was not long before his sentiments were changed, and he came out of the committee as decidedly favourable to the views and opinions of Mr. Horner (whom death had prematurely snatched from witnessing this triumph of his labours) as he had been adverse to them, when that eminent individual had, with so much zeal and so much ability, introduced them to the notice of parlia

ment.

Nor have we ever been amongst the number of those who vilified the late lamented statesman for this change of opinion. We believe it to have been sincere. We believe that nothing short of overpowering conviction could have compelled him thus to set himself at variance with the views or the opinions

of his venerable father, who undoubtedly felt it a stunning blow, that on such a subject he should meet his most formidable antagonist in his son.

We have no time, even if we had any disposition, to say more at present than that the truth may have lain between them. Regarding the currency as the life-blood of the commercial system, it is only in a healthy state when the serum and the crassamentum bear to each other a due proportion. Should the former unduly predominate, the circulation is languid and devoid of nutriment; should the latter, it be comes torpid, and but little of healthy nutriment can be conveyed. In either case, the evil is great: which is the greater we shall not pretend to say. "Ad huc sub judice lis est." It remains for the financial authorities eventually to decide whether, in reality, the late lamented statesman did more, by his important measures of 1821 and 1844, than substitute the one evil for the other the evil of a restricted currency, screwed up to a metallic standard, for the evil of an unrestricted currency, which, while it injuriously affected our exchanges with foreign countries, encouraged, in our own, imprudent speculation, which resulted in crushing ruin to thousands.

But

That the late Sir Robert Peel could have ever contemplated his own personal gain by his monetary legislation, is a calumny too despicable to be noticed. By no one who had ever personally known him could it be for one moment entertained. Such, undoubtedly, was not his weak point. that he had a most sensitive regard to the value of character, is equally undoubted; and that he prided himself upon the measure, which, while it somewhat damaged his consistency, he regarded as the basis of his reputation as a profound and far-seeing financial statesman, there are few who would deny; and we are not sure that he did not cling to it with a fondness of parental partiality, which rendered him blind to its defects, and insensible to its dangers.

We are not now discussing the measures, but endeavouring to estimate the character of this eminent statesman; and while, in the abandonment of strongly-expressed and long pertinaciously maintained opinions, we are not disposed to question his sincerity; it is yet a striking fact, that, for