How little I thought on my last birthday how it would be before my next.  I looked in my journal to see about it and found it full of him; but not exactly as I should write now—­reproaching myself for not returning the affection of one whose character I admired and liked so much.  I should have been rightly punished by his thinking no more about me; but then, to be sure, I should not have known what my loss was.  He said a few days ago that he hoped it would be a happy birthday—­said it as humbly as he always speaks of his powers of making me so—­yet he must know that a brighter could not have dawned upon me, and that he is the cause....

    Lord John Russell to Lady Minto

    ENDSLEIGH, November 23, 1841

Fanny’s own letters will have given you the best insight into her feelings since we came here.  It has been the most fortunate thing for us all.  Fanny herself, Addy, Georgy, Miss Lister, and indeed all of us, have had means of fitting and cementing here, which no London or visiting life could have given us.  I never can be sufficiently grateful for such a blessing as Fanny is to me; and I only feel the more grateful that she reconciles herself so well to the loss of the home she loved so well.  Nor is this by loving you or any one she has left at all the less—­far from it, every day proves her devotion to you and her anxiety for your happiness.

They could not take a long holiday, although Lord John was now in Opposition.  Early in February the great Anti-Corn Law League bazaar was held at Manchester, and a few days later Peel carried his sliding scale:  20s. duty when corn was 57s., 12s. when the price was 60s., and 1s. when it reached 73s.  Lord John proposed an amendment in favour of a fixed duty of 8s.

    CHESHAM PLACE, [23] February 14, 1842

Beginning of Corn Law debate.  Went to hear Lord John.  He began—­excellent speech—­attacked the measure as founded on the same bad principle as the present corn laws; showed the absurdity of any corn laws to make us independent of foreign countries; the cruelty of doing nothing to relieve the distress of the manufacturing districts; the different results of a sliding scale and a fixed duty; the advantages of free trade, even with all countries, especially with the United States, etc., etc.; was much cheered.  Answered by Mr. Gladstone, beside whose wife I was sitting.

[23] Lord John had built a house, 37, Chesham Place, which was henceforward their London home.

Lord John’s amendment was lost by 123 votes; Villiers’ and Brougham’s amendments in favour of total repeal by over three hundred.  This measure of the sliding scale did not embody Peel’s real conviction at the time; its object was to discover how much the agricultural party would stand.  Gladstone himself was in favour of a more liberal reduction in the sliding scale; and it appears from his journal that he very nearly resigned the Presidency of the Board of Trade in consequence of Peel’s measure.  Peel asked Gladstone to reply to Lord John Russell.  “This I did,” he says, “and with all my heart, for I did not yet fully understand the vicious operation of the sliding scale on the corn trade, and it is hard to see how an eight-shilling duty could even then have been maintained.”