only. He said so himself. He had to choose between two evils; and he chose the lesser, without any pretence of liking it. This event gave the key to the rest of his life, if he and his critics could have understood it. It cost him much anguish to give up the repute of consistency, and he was slow to learn that the function of statesmanship had essentially changed with the necessity of a progressive policy. His business in life was to discern, in spite of early prepossessions, political necessities a little sooner than people in general, and to adopt them with a good grace, and adapt them skilfully to practice, without affording the smallest countenance to political profligacy or levity. It was a task of extreme difficulty, and not at all of supreme honour. He was satisfied, happily, with a lot of singular usefulness, invested with a doubtful or damaged glory. He gave us peace with Ireland; he gave Ireland a renewed existence; he retrieved our finance by a series of measures from the Bank Act of 1819 to the repeal of the Corn Laws in 1846, which might, in each instance, have cost him the sacrifice of his career and of his political reputation. No witness of his first change ought to have been surprised at any subsequent one, because, in each case, his sense of duty was clearly concerned. He was the sincere and devout high-priest of expediency, in that province of human life in which expediency is both the obligation and the rule of duty. He suffered acutely under the various kinds of censure and insult that his position exposed him to; but he rose in character as well as repute, in proportion as his function became clearly understood by himself and others. Before his death he was incomparably the first statesman of the time; and at home his influence was almost equally great, whether he was in office or out of it. His career was not what his father, and his friends, and he himself had imagined: and it was what he would have recoiled from in horror, if he could have had a prevision of it; but it was great in its way, and will be immortal as an illustration of a critical period in the history of Europe. He seems not to have spent any words or thoughts on this point—so deeply interesting to us watchers of the world’s history. Peel’s memorable concluding aspiration, when leaving office, affords full insight into his own view of his own career. He hoped to be remembered at the cottage dinner-table, where the poor man was henceforth to eat sweeter bread—“no longer leavened by the sense of injustice.” He will be remembered there for generations to come. But he will also stand conspicuous in history as, by force of circumstances and by his wisdom vanquishing his will, the great Progressive Statesman of his age, whose work it was to lead on his country while other countries were standing still, or rushing all ways but the right; and whose everlasting honour it will be that the polity conducted by him grew stronger in compactness, loftier in intelligence, and more expansive in prosperity, while the political edifices of the Metternichs, and Bourbons, and Romanoffs, whom he knew so well, were crumbling into ruin, with or without previous explosions of revolution. The fact affords some hint of what England owes to her Progressive Statesmen.
THE GREAT FIRE AT LONDON BRIDGE.
It would seem as if every now and then the elements had a field-day, by way of proving how weak are all the appliances of science to combat with them. Fire, especially, has been testing our cunning of late, and the ground it has chosen for the match against us has been in the neighbourhood of London Bridge. Within a very few years we have had Alderman Humphery’s Wharf and Fenning’s Wharf burnt down, and now the great fire of June 22nd, in which about two millions of property has been destroyed. After the two former buildings were destroyed, they were rebuilt, declared to be fire-proof. One of them has been tested again by the devouring element, and swept away as speedily as though it had been a card-house. In short, this last catastrophe has demonstrated that fire-proof buildings, as at present constructed, are neither fire-proof against themselves when of large area and filled with combustible materials, nor against neighbouring fires of great magnitude. Poor Braidwood, who has gone to his account, predicted long ago that our system of fire-proofing buildings was a delusion and a snare, and he also, with prophetic eye, foretold the time when fires would, through man’s cupidity and carelessness, grow beyond the powers of man to extinguish them. It would seem as though we deliberately planned these costly warehouses, in which the riches of the world are stored, to burn, as we lay the fuel in the grate for the same purpose. Oil and tallow will rarely, if ever, be found stored alone; if they were, the difficulty of firing them would be great indeed, but with these materials we heap immense stores of hemp and jute, which are well known to be very liable to spontaneous combustion.
The materials for the future blaze thus being carefully provided, we pile upon the whole in the upper floors precious silks, teas, and wines. The hemp fires, as it has just done at Cotton’s Wharf, and the body of flame becomes so great that fire-engines sink in their presence into ridiculous squirts. Mr. Braidwood has shown that in such fires as that which we have just witnessed, the heat inside these vast buildings becomes that of a crucible, so fierce as to melt the iron pillars and girders with which the different floors are supported, like so much glass. Indeed, this iron, to which we trust so much in our fire-proof buildings, has been proved to be a positive source of danger. Iron heated beyond 600° loses its cohesive power, and becomes utterly untrustworthy. The girders which support the floors are sure to expand, and their action must then be to destroy the strongest walls. For all we know to the contrary, poor Braidwood met his death in consequence of the thrusting out of the walls from this very cause. In order to insure the safety of our so-called fire-proof buildings, the only reliable method is to build with solid bricks, all vaultings being made of the same material. The interior of each warehouse should be so subdivided by these fire-proof walls, that the body of flame and heat in each should not affect its neighbour. If this were done, we predict that we should see no more great fires in London. At one time it was the normal condition of Liverpool to have
