VII

PEEL AND ADMINISTRATIVE REFORMS

[ROBERT PEEL, born February 5, 1788, near Bury, Lancashire; died, London, July 2, 1850; educated at Harrow and Christ Church, Oxford, B.A., 1808 (double first); Member of Parliament, 1809; 1811, Under-Secretary for the Colonies; 1812-18, Secretary for Ireland; 1817, Member of Parliament for Oxford University; 1819, advocated return to specie payment; 1820, married Julia, daughter of General Sir John Floyd; 1822-27, Home Secretary, Leader of House of Commons; 1826, proposed reform of Criminal Law; 1828, Home Secretary and Leader of the House; 1829, proposed Catholic emancipation; 1834-35, Prime Minister; 1841-46, Prime Minister; 1842, carried Income Tax; 1846, repealed the Corn Laws; 1846-50, without office.]

When the Reform Bill of 1832 was passed, the Duke of Wellington bluntly declared his conviction that the result would be the speedy overthrow of the British Constitution. More sagacious observers than the great fieldmarshal were of the opinion that a radical change must ensue, and that the Tory party, long the prop of Church and Throne, having lost control of legislation in the House of Commons through the abolition of the close and rotten boroughs, could never regain the seat of power by electing a majority of members. That these forebodings and prophecies did not come true was largely due to the consummate political skill of Sir Robert Peel.

In reviewing a life so rich in public activity as Peel's it is impossible to point to any one important question as his

particular contribution to the history of his time.

There was scarcely a single great parliamentary battle in which he did not bear a hand on one side or the other. Indeed, hostile criticism has censured him for having in not a few instances carried to ultimate success the very measures of which, when first proposed, he had been the stoutest enemy. This is true of the Resumption of Specie Payments, the Catholic Emancipation Acts, and most notably of all the repeal of the Corn Laws. The characteristics which resulted so strangely may be accounted for in part at least by some knowledge of the early life of the great parliamentary leader.

The Peels were weavers and printers of calicoes. The father of the Prime Minister was one of the wealthiest manufacturers in his generation, a thorough-going Tory, and an ardent admirer of Mr. Pitt. He was sent to Parliament in 1790, and his support of the government by his vote there, and by his contribution of fifty thousand pounds to the war fund, won for him, in 1800, a baronetcy. There had been Robert Peels before his day, but now for the first time there was a Sir Robert.

Sir Robert's most loving care was lavished upon the training of his eldest son and namesake, who from the day of his birth, February 5, 1788, the patriotic father had prayerfully consecrated to the service of his country. Many stories are told of the pains which the great calicoprinter bestowed on the lad's training for a public career. We see the little lad standing on a table to declaim or recite to his parental mentor, and read of the rigor of cross-examination to which this lad of twelve was subjected after hearing a sermon or public address. A current anecdote represents the doting father as saying, “ Bob,

you dog, if you're not prime minister, I'll disinherit you." At Harrow, as a schoolboy he reflected credit upon his father's training, and at Christ Church, Oxford, he achieved the unusual honor of a double first class (classics and mathematics). When he left the university at the age of twentyone his father provided him with a seat in Parliament, and so, with every favoring circumstance of youth, health, education, friends, and wealth, he began his eventful career in the House of Commons which was to be the scene of his best labors until the day of his death.

Old Sir Robert and his son sat on the same side of the House, but the alert and active mind of the young man could not accept untested his father's political creed of hide-bound Toryism. The first question upon which the son and father parted company was on the subject of the resumption of specie payments, which had been discontinued in 1797 under the financial stress of the war with France. In 1811 the two Peels voted together against a resolution looking toward resumption, but the younger man's mind was fascinated with the economic aspects of the problem, and half a dozen years later, when the subject again pressed for settlement, he brought forward the act which placed England on a gold basis. The father openly bewailed the son's misguided course, but Peel's act became the law (1819).

Before he was thirty, the younger Robert Peel had gained a valuable experience in administrative work by a term of six years (1812-1818) as Chief Secretary for Ireland. Here, as in the preparation of his studies at Oxford and of his speeches for the House of Commons, he was painstaking, methodical, thorough, and energetic. In fact he applied to the public business the same sterling

qualities which had made his father and grandfather successful merchants and manufacturers. His most notable reform in Ireland, which was then in a sad condition of disorder, was the replacement of military rule by a wellorganized civil force of police, acting under the orders of the magistrates. He favored a more liberal scheme of popular education for the unhappy island, but his Tory prejudices stood in the way of relieving the Catholics of their disabilities. Because of his avowed opposition to this demand, and his bitter hostility to O'Connell, the champion of the cause, Mr. Peel-"Orange" Peel, as the Catholic Irish nicknamed him-had the satisfaction of being returned to Parliament in 1817 for the University of Oxford, perhaps the most ultra-Tory constituency in the three kingdoms.

In January, 1822, Peel entered the cabinet of Lord Liverpool, as Home Secretary. From the first he showed that his mind was not impenetrable to the legal reforms which earnest men had long been advocating, but to which the Tories had turned a deaf ear. The reform of the criminal law, which still carried the harsh statutes of an unquiet age, had been ably championed by Romilly, Mackintosh, and others, but it was Peel's way first to oppose, then to admit the principle of the reform, and finally to enact it into enduring law. On his initiative, in 1823, "nearly one hundred felonies were removed from the list of capital crimes, and judges were empowered to withhold the death penalty in all cases except murder, when the culprit appeared deserving of mercy." Other acts originating with him consolidated and unified the vast and complex body of criminal statutes so as to simplify procedure, and facilitate the ends of justice. Some

conception of his services in this particular may be gained from the fact that "he secured the repeal of two hundred and seventy-eight acts relating to the criminal law, embodying their useful provisions in eight acts."

On Catholic emancipation Peel's process of conversion was slower. He steadily fought the proposals for relief in the House of Commons as long as Lord Liverpool lived, and when Canning succeeded to the premiership (1827), he resigned rather than serve under a pro-Catholic chief. When the Tories came back to power under Wellington, in 1828, Peel resumed the Home Secretaryship, with the leadership of the House of Commons, a position for which he possessed incomparable qualifications. His second administration of the home department was distinguished by a series of radical improvements in the criminal laws. One law for the punishment of offenses against the person took the place of fifty-seven existing acts. In 1829 he replaced the ridiculous London watch with the police force which has served as a model for many other large cities. Many who speak familiarly of the bluecoated guardians of the peace as "Bobbies" and "Peelers" would be surprised to know that these sobriquets constitute a popular tribute to the name of Robert Peel, the creator of the model force.

These legal and administrative reforms, beneficent as they were, were not great party questions like the two others which the Wellington government had to face, and gained so little credit in the facing. The Whigs, under John Russell, urged the demand for the relief of Protestant dissenters from their political disabilities by the repeal of the Test and Corporation Acts. Peel argued against the change, but it was carried, nevertheless, and the