why, when there is no limit to the augmentation of the number of lay peers, it should be judged impolitic or unjust to make even so small an addition to the number of spiritual peers.  At the Restoration the spiritual peers were, probably, more than a fifth of the entire House.  From the great number of subsequent creations of lay peers they were now less than a sixteenth, so that there could be no ground for apprehending that a slight re-enforcement of the Episcopal bench would disturb the balance, or give the Church an undue preponderating weight in the decisions of the House.  The difficulty, however, such as it appeared to the Duke then, has had such weight with subsequent administrations, that a new principle has been established of creating bishoprics which shall not at first confer seats in the Upper House till their holders become entitled to them by seniority.  As they are peers from the moment of their consecration, it may be doubted whether this creation of peers, without seats in Parliament, does not deserve the name of “an organic change in the constitution,” far more than the addition of one or two ecclesiastical peers to the Episcopal bench; and also whether it has not established a dangerous principle and precedent; the disconnection of bishoprics from seats in Parliament, in even a single instance, seeming to furnish an argument in favor of the exclusion of the whole order, a measure which, if unjust and injurious to the Church, would be at least equally injurious to Parliament itself, and to the whole state.

But all questions of this kind were presently lost sight of in the excitement produced by the measure which more than any other has stamped Sir Robert Peel’s administration with a lasting character, the repeal of the Corn-laws.  Many statesmen, even of those who were most in favor of free-trade in other articles of commerce, made an exception in the case of corn, partly from a feeling of the necessity of encouraging agriculture, and partly from a conviction of the danger of in any way contributing to create or increase a dependence on foreign countries for the food of the people.  Both Whigs and Tories were generally thus agreed on the necessity of maintaining the principle of protection; the dispute between the two parties being whether it were best achieved by a fixed duty on imported corn, or by what was commonly known as a sliding scale:  a scale, that is, which varied inversely with the price of the grain itself, rising as the price in the home market fell, and falling as it rose.  In the manufacturing districts a different feeling had prevailed for some years.  In the first years of the present reign severe distress in Manchester and others of the chief manufacturing towns had led to the formation of an association whose chief object was sufficiently indicated by its title of the Anti-Corn-law League.  At first Mr. Villiers, the member for Wolverhampton, was its principal spokesman in the House of Commons, but at subsequent elections