teristic of the somewhat haughty courtesy which in later years grew upon him, that he 'playfully reminded Her Majesty that the last English Sovereign who had approached the Castle was Henry IV; and he "had remained outside for weeks and never gained admission."'
The fall of the Melbourne Ministry made way for Sir Robert Peel; and Lord Dalhousie, who had early won the confidence of the great conservative statesman, was appointed Vice-President of the Board of Trade in 1843, Mr. Gladstone, his former fellow-undergraduate at Christ Church, was President; and on Mr. Gladstone's resignation of that post in 1845, the young Earl succeeded.
As President of the Board of Trade Lord Dalhousie found himself face to face with the railway mania of 1845-46. He laid before the Prime Minister a scheme for treating the new system of communication as a national concern, and for bringing it under a more direct and effective control by the State. Lord Dalhousie's admirers claim for him that if his proposals had been accepted, England would have been spared the wide-spread ruin of the railway panic, which soon afterwards resulted from leaving railway development to private competition. Whether it would have been in the long-run so productive of facilities to English commerce is another question. Sir Robert Peel, probably with good reason, believed
