experience and capacity. (Loud cheers.) If the right honourable gentleman had the courage to adopt the system which he himself believed to be sound, he would rally the people to his support, he would take that higher station which he represented as alone making office valuable to him. Cheers.) Those who had the power to declare his not doing this, had not the capacity to form a government. (Cheers.) Who were the victims of all this pride on the one side, and of avarice on the other; of this trial to maintain a consistency for a month or a year on the one side, and of a struggle to retain that to which they had no right, on the other? It was the people. (Cheers.) Could they wonder, then, that the honourable member for Rochdale should seek to stop the supplies when those crying grievances existed, without a hope of redress? Was his honourable friend, the member for Stockport, to be blamed when, with this before him, he was labouring from morning to night, not going to the extreme means of the honourable member for Rochdale, but trying to influence the constitution of the House of Commons, so as to make them do justice to the people? (Cheers.) Had they any right to blame him, or could they wonder at the organization of which he was the head? They knew that evils existed, for which it was now hopeless to expect redress; these were the justifications for his exertions, and if it were tried, with those evils existing, to prevent the expression of complaints, in his opinion a greater error could not be committed. (Loud cheers.)
How often was repeated now the remark of Poulett Thomson; in 1839—" Peel could do it, if he had the courage." But he had it not. He submitted to the indecent, haughty, and dictatorial declarations of the monopolists that he was nothing without them; wincing, perhaps, under their insolence, but without the boldness to set them at defiance; resolved, perhaps, at some favourable opportunity, to assort his independence, but not daring to make the opportunity. And all the while Lord J. Russell standing by and uttering his little Shibboleth!
