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The thirty years from Waterloo have the unity and, at times, the intensity of a great drama. Castlereagh and Canning adjusted our insular relations to the Old World and the New. The Reform Act and the Municipal Reform Act gave the islands a rational political framework; steam unified their economic structure. Of all these processes, the Repeal of the Corn Laws in 1846 was the logical and historical culmination. The operations of the League, which had gone with a swing all through the bad years, flagged with the return of prosperity in 1843 and the absorption of the unemployed by the railway boom; by 1845 manufacturers did not know where to turn for hands. Peel himself was slowly moving towards Free Trade in corn, but he was restrained, not by a political, but by an economic scruple: the belief that cheap food meant low wages and that the loss of rents to the land-owner would be followed with no compensating advantage to the working classes. When this doubt was resolved his way grew clear. The great Budget of 1842, in which he had swept away the accumulated muddles of the Whigs and raised an income tax to lower the customs, marks the opening stage of classical Victorian finance. Incidentally, the sliding scale of 1828, which had refused to slide, was readjusted. In 1845 he repeated his stroke, and circumstances were gradually imposing a larger policy on his mind. Of his young men, Gladstone, Lincoln, Canning, Ramsay were Free Traders already, and Peel, behind the repellent front which he turned to the world, and which, indeed, cost him his life, was exceptionally sensitive to the ideas, and the sufferings, of others. The prosperity of the mid-forties had not spread to the villages; whatever the cause, the consequences were plain enough: ‘I be protected and I be starving.’ One good harvest more, to keep the League quiet, and he would go to the country as a Free Trader, with the compensating offer of a credit for the re-conditioning of the land and the absorption of the next wave of unemployment, and return with the middle-class Conservatism he had created, solidly based on the gratitude of the towns and the regeneration of the farming interest. The disaster which depopulated Ireland shattered the Conservative party on the threshold of a generation of power.^[50]

The Irish difficulty went deeper than the philosophy of the age could reach. The twin cell of English life, the squire administering what everybody recognizes as law and the parson preaching what everybody acknowledges to be religion, had no meaning in a country where the squire was usually an invader and the parson always a heretic. England had staked the good government of Ireland on a double speculation, that the Irish would conform to the Protestant establishment and that they would accept the English use of landlord, farmer, and labourer. The Irishry preferred to misgovern themselves as Catholics and small-holders, and the Englishry, after a few generations, were all too ready to take up the part of tribal chiefs. To analyse the Irish trouble into racial, religious, and agrarian is impossible because in Irish history these three are one, and when England had conceded Catholic emancipation against her own Protestants, and insisted on agrarian reform against the Irish landlords, and both in vain, the logic of history left her no alternative but to concede all the rest, never quite understanding what it was the Irish wanted or why they wanted it.

From The Times, 3 July 1850

From The Times, 11 September 1855

Thus throughout the nineteenth century Ireland was an uneasy place in the body politic which could be neither forgotten nor assuaged. In the thirties it is tithes and crime. The establishment was a grievance which an English government might alleviate if it could not remove. Disorder was a pestilence which it was bound to stamp out. Hence the history of Lord Grey’s Government is taken up very largely with Irish Church bills and Irish coercion bills. On the whole the Whigs were successful, mainly because they sent two honest gentlemen, Drummond and Ebrington, to the Castle and left them alone, and in ’41 they handed over to their successors an Ireland neither prosperous nor contented, but at least reasonably quiet. The nationalist agitation which sprang up suddenly in the following years, round Gavan Duffy and his friends, was unexpected. Had it fallen a little earlier so as to coincide with the Chartist movement in England, and if O’Connell could have overcome his aversion to physical force, the results might have been memorable. But in 1839 Ireland was so peaceful that soldiers could be spared for England, and in 1843 England was in such good humour that they could be safely sent to Ireland. On October 5 a great demonstration was to assemble at Clontarf; it was proclaimed and O’Connell arrested. Convicted, almost of course, by a Protestant Dublin jury, he was set at liberty by the House of Lords. The incident added a phrase to the language—Lord Denman saying that trial by jury as practised in this case was ‘a delusion, a mockery, and a snare’, and the Nationalist movement died down.^[51] Peel’s Government used their victory not unwisely. They issued a Royal Commission of Enquiry into Irish land tenure and, in the teeth of a frantic Protestant opposition, they carried their proposal to increase the grant for training Irish priests at Maynooth. On the report of the Commission, a classic document for the history of the Irish question, they introduced a Bill to secure compensation for improving tenants. The Lords objected and the Bill was withdrawn for further consideration. The occasion had passed and it did not return.

Early in August 1845, at the end of a successful session, with a thriving country and a full exchequer, Peel received a letter from a potato-dealer, warning him that the crop was diseased and the disease spreading. Half the population of Ireland lived on potatoes, and by the beginning of October it was doubtful whether half the crop would be saved. England had been accustomed to take on an average 2,000,000 quarters of wheat from Ireland. It looked as if she would have to send 2,000,000 quarters to keep the Irish alive, and the English harvest was short. It was out of the question to ask the English to pay duty both on the corn they ate themselves, and on the corn they bought for the Irish: equally impossible to suppose that the Corn Laws, once suspended, could ever be reimposed, or that the Conservative party, as it stood, would ever consent to repeal them. Peel, with the support of the Whigs and with a fragment of his own party, undertook to admit foreign corn at a nominal fixed duty.^[52] Supported by imminent famine, the arguments of the League could not be answered: they could only be opposed. It seemed as if nature, which was solving the Irish problem in the sense of the economists by killing off the surplus population, would solve an English problem in the sense of the Radicals by killing off the superfluous landlords. In fact, it did no harm to the English gentry, and it made the Irish problem insoluble. The Encumbered Estates thrown on the market were bought up by investors who proceeded to reorganize them economically by wholesale evictions, and for years hardly a ship sailed to the west without its freight of exiles carrying to America an unappeasable passion for vengeance on the dispossessor.

Yet there was never an Irish tragedy without its satyric afterpiece. In 1848, Smith O’Brien, a respectable and humourless Member of Parliament who seems to have been drawn to Repeal by simple despair of the Union, was caught levying war on the Queen’s Majesty in the widow McCormack’s cabbage garden. The campaign was brief, as O’Brien had forgotten to provide his army with anything to eat. He was sentenced to the usual penalty, which was at once commuted to transportation. With the maddening logic which Irishmen have at command he argued that as he had not been convicted of anything deserving transportation, he must be pardoned or he must be hanged. The Law Officers admitted his contention, and a short Act had to be passed providing that, in spite of the earnest expectation of the creatures, O’Brien and others in like case might lawfully be required to remain alive.

[50]

Peel’s long-distance programme will be found in a memorandum by Prince Albert, Christmas 1845. His character is not easy to read, because his mastery of Parliamentary methods masked an intense dislike of the party system, while his frigid efficiency covered an almost passionate concern for the welfare of the people. On his last ride an acquaintance, who recognized his horse as a bolter, was afraid to warn him, but in a begging letter-writer’s list of people most likely to be touched for a fiver, Peel’s name was found with good Queen Adelaide and Dickens.

[51]	And split up, the split being signalized by the foundation of the United Irishman in opposition to The Nation.

[52]	It is characteristic of Early Victorian manners that in the Cabinet paper announcing his conversion, Peel can hardly bring himself to call That Root by its proper name. It was observed that in all prayers offered up for our Irish brethren, potatoes were never mentioned.