tories resist till they can resist no longer; and when any little thing is done, that little becomes a settlement, a part of venerable institutions; a finality, to be zealously protected from enlargement, till something better is extorted. Such being our opinion, we are impatient at the constant iteration of the question, 'What will Peel do?' A people determined on achieving their rights would not waste their time on such idle speculations. 'What will the emperor do?' may be an appropriate question in Russia or Austria, but we have a public opinion here that is not uninfluential, and we have a sort of representation that might be made to be beneficially influential; to be to make both and our business ought to be to make both operative upon legislation.
"But though it is idle to be always asking what Peel will do, we may profitably employ ourselves in considering his position, for there are many who will not agitate for the removal of a wrong unless they are assured of favouring circumstances; and we think that ministers are in a position as obstructives which they cannot sustain, if the people, acting on Bentham's rule, only do their duty.
"In the first place we have a declining revenue, and the necessities of ministers will compel them again to revise their tariff and to lower the duties on sugar, coffee, and timber. These changes may be reasonably looked for. But there will be some juggle attempted, which the people must be prepared to defeat. There is a talk that the duty on foreign sugar is to be reduced to 30s., and on colonial to 16s.; and some of the whig journalists are prepared to support such change, notwithstanding the fact that the whole of the 14s. of difference will go into the pockets of the West India planters, and that the duty on Brazilian sugar will still keep it out of the reach of the working classes, who, at lower prices, would be great consumers. It may be pretty nearly conjectured, "What Peel will do." The pressure from without, must be directed, so that the half measure may be deprived of its most objectionable characteristic,—
