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      VIEW IN OREGON: THE COLUMBIA RIVER AND MOUNT HOOD.

      inevitable, and which would send him into the retirement for which latterly he had begun to crave. A great deal has been said and written as to the reasons which induced the various parties to form combinations against the Administration that had done the State such noble service. The motives of its enemies, however, were simple enough. The Protectionists had what they called their “betrayal” to avenge; the Whigs considered that Peel had behaved most ungenerously to the Melbourne Ministry, whose conciliatory Irish policy, as worked out by Lord Normanby and Mr. Drummond, had promised well for that country. They firmly believed that if they were in power they could control Ireland by kindness, but that in applying such a policy, they did not dare to trust as a colleague the Minister who had so unscrupulously overthrown Lord Melbourne. A union between Peel and Lord John Russell, such as the Queen desired to bring about, was also impossible for another reason—Peel would not part company with Sir James Graham. Lord John Russell, on the other hand, would not consent to act with Sir James, whom the Whigs detested as an unforgivable renegade. The Coercion Bill for Ireland was therefore doomed from the outset, not on its merits, but by party passion. This was so strong, that the Whigs in the House of Lords, as if to give Peel warning of his fate, actually combined with the Protectionists to defeat Lord Lyndhurst’s Charitable Trusts Bill, although it was directed against abuses which every Whig was pledged to attack. “We, alas,” Lord Campbell confesses, “with shame,” had “not enough virtue to withstand the temptation of snatching a vote against the Government”42—a vote, by the way, which kept alive heinous abuses for eight years longer.

      The Upper House, however, was not quite so factious over the Irish Coercion Bill. It was introduced by the Earl of St. Germains, who explained that it enabled the Government not only to proclaim any district in Ireland in which crime prevailed, but to quarter extra police on it at the expense of the ratepayers. Stringent clauses prohibiting the possession of arms, and preventing people from quitting their houses between sunset and sunrise, were added. These were, in fact, the clauses which whetted the wit of the younger Radicals against what they derisively termed, not an Irish Coercion, but an “Irish Curfew Bill.” The Lords were also told that outrages in Ireland had risen from 1,496 in 1844, to 3,642 in 1845, and the Bill passed through the Upper House with very trifling opposition. It was in the Commons that it was destined to be made the battle-ground of factions. The Protectionists pretended that Peel was not in earnest in introducing it; for, though the Bill was announced in January, it was not till the 30th of March that Sir James Graham moved the first reading, and not till late in June that the second reading was taken. The Whigs and Radicals objected to the Bill because they held that conciliation, and not repression, was wanted in Ireland. The Irish members taunted Peel with having created the disturbances in Ireland by changing the tolerant policy of Melbourne, Normanby, and Drummond, and by giving Irish judicial appointments to the most violent Orange partisans. Others, like Mr. Roche, asked “Why don’t you feed the Irish peasantry, if, as is clear, hunger is making them discontented?” The position of men like Mr. Cobden was most embarrassing. As Liberals, they were bound to vote against the Bill. But then they did not wish to expel Peel from office—and Peel had said that by the Bill he would stand or fall. They decided at last to vote against the measure, and rightly, for it was impossible to carry on the Queen’s Government with three parties in the House—Peelites, Protectionists, and Whig Tree Traders. A single vote, moreover, could not save the Ministry, for Peel’s enemies would soon have organised another combination against him on another question. The Bill was accordingly defeated

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