bid. They expected that the people would come to them, quite unconscious that the reply was: "You must come to us." Although they abandoned their public duties the moment they were deprived of office, they expected that the public would back them when there was a chance of their return to office. Although they did nothing when they had the power, they expected to be carried into power again—again to do nothing.
Ministers, previous to the prorogation of parliament, asked for and obtained the power of calling out, arming, and training ten thousand men, to be picked from the whole of the Chelsea Pensioners. They justified this extraordinary increase to the effective force of the standing army, on the ground that it was well to be prepared for any emergency; and Sir Robert Peel refused to allow the limitation of this new power to five years, because any limitation would be an acknowledgment that it was an unconstitutional one! He was about, as he was two years before, to retire to Drayton Manor for five months, there to consider what further prescription would be necessary for the suffering patient whom, meanwhile, he left under the Castlereagh regimen. This extraordinary measure for supplying the means of coercion, had the additional discredit of being introduced at the very close of the session, when few members remained in town except the officials, whose votes were at the service of Ministers. Some twenty members, and amongst then Mr. Cobden and Mr. Bright, had manfully resisted this extra-arming act, to put down any expression of that universal dissatisfaction which was the result of misgovernment; but where were all the rest of the so-called liberals, that they did not return to their places in opposition? There was one comfort in all this indifference on one side and of encroachment on the other, that things were rapidly drifting on to that state of public opinion which made the first great inroad upon the rotten borough system. The refusal of corn had wonderfully increased the demand for votes.
