“. . . I was one of the majority last night in support of his Majesty’s Ministers for cheaper corn than the landed grandees will now favor us with. . . . It certainly is the boldest thing that ever was attempted by a Government—after deprecating any discussion on the Corn Laws during the present session, to try at the end of it to carry a Corn Law of their own by a coup-de-main, and to hold out the landed grandees as the enemies of the manufacturing population if they oppose it. . . . If a good ultra-Tory Government could be made, Canning and Huskisson must inevitably be ruined by this daring step. You never heard such language as the old sticklers apply to them; and, unhappily for Toryism, that prig Peel seems as deeply bitten by ‘liberality,’ in every way but on the Catholic question, as any of his fellows. I was laughing with Lord Dudley under the gallery at this curious state of things, who said if the Duke of York wd. but come down to the House of Lords and declare that ‘so help him G——, corn should never be under 80s.,’ he would drive this Radical Government to the devil in an instant.”
