wisdom, and may conduce to the happiness of her beloved people."
It was a bold course taken by the whig administration to recommend such a speech from the throne, unless we attribute the courage to despair. The House of Lords, composed exclusively of landowners, and independent of the people's suffrages, was not likely to re-echo the acknowledgment of distress occasioned by selfish legislation, nor was the House of Commons, constituted by the Reform Bill to give a preponderance to the landed interest, and elected at a period when great distrust prevailed amongst reformers and free traders as to the intentions of the whig administration, likely to adopt the liberal commercial policy recommended. Everybody knew what would be the immediate, nobody knew what would be the ultimate result. That the whigs would be defeated every body knew—that the very same Parliament under a tory administration would reform the tariff to a greater extent than the whigs contemplated, and totally repeal the Corn Laws, which the whigs proposed only to modify, nobody could have dreamed of.
The debate upon the address, in the Lords on Tuesday August 24th, was a Corn-Law debate, ministers and their supporters endeavouring to show that an eight-shilling duty would not ruin the agriculturists; and their opponents, not knowing what was to come, protesting against any changes. Earl Spencer who moved the address, himself a practical agriculturist, gave evidence that the Corn Laws afforded no protection to the farmer, and that the substitution of a moderate fixed duty would not throw land out of cultivation. Earl Fitzwilliam, one of the largest landowners in the kingdom, spoke to the same effect. Lord Brougham declared that he was in favour of a total repeal of the Corn Law, but would prefer its accomplishment gradually. The Duke of Wellington who, some ten years before, had declared that the representative system needed
