The precise seat of Sir Robert Peel's difficulty at home was, that his
immediate predecessors had (whether wilfully or otherwise signifies
nothing for the present) raised expectations among the people, which _no
party_ could satisfy; while their measures has reduced the people to a
state in which the disappointment of those expectations seemed to
excuse, if not justify, even downright rebellion. They arrayed the
agricultural and manufacturing interests in deadly hostility against
each other; they sought to make the one responsible for the consequences
springing only from the reckless misconduct of the other. The farmers
must be run down and ruined in order to repair the effects of excessive
credit and over-trading among the manufacturers; the corn-grower must
smart for the sins of the cotton-spinner. Such were some of the fierce
elements of discord in full action, when the affairs of the nation were
committed by her Majesty to her present Ministers, on whom it lay to
promote permanent domestic tranquillity, amidst this conflict between
interests which had been taught that they were irreconcilable with each
other; to sustain the public credit at once, without endangering our
internal peace and safety, or compromising the honour of the nation in
its critical and embarrassing foreign relations. How were they to effect
these apparently incompatible objects? "See," said the enemies of the
Ministry, "see, by and by, when parliament assembles, a cruel specimen
of _class legislation_--the unjust triumph of the landed interest--the
legitimate working of the Chandos clause in the Reform Bill!" But bear
witness, parliamentary records, how stood the fact!

That the present Ministry are mainly indebted for their accession to
power, to the prodigious exertions of the agricultural interest during
the last general election, is, we presume, undeniable. It was talked of
as their mere tool or puppet. Their first act is to lower the duties on
the importation of foreign cattle! "We are ruined!" cried the farmers in