THE THREE KINGDOMS.

We are all Free-traders now, said Mr. Cobden on
the hustings of the West Riding.—"I think it my
duty," said the President of the Board of Trade to the
electors of the county of Oxford, "to tell my agricultural
friends in different parts of the county that
there is no chance of a change; that there is no intention
on the part of any man to propose that Parliament
shall restore any laws which the voice of the
country has completely rejected."—"Gentlemen,"
said the son and heir of Lord Derby, at Lynn, "the
question of Protection is set at rest; and I am glad
of it!"—"Why," exclaimed Mr. Disraeli, at his
harmonious election dinner in Bucks, "no one can suppose
that the present Administration has any intention, or
ever had any intention, of taxing the food of the
people, or of bringing back the laws repealed in 1846!"
Mr. Cobden, then, would appear to have some reason
for saying, with a victorious leader's half-mournful
retrospect over laurels finally gathered, and battles
become things of the past, We are all Free-traders now!

Let him be quite sure, nevertheless, that he does not
reckon without his host, and that he may not find
himself even yet face to face with an adverse one. It does
not follow of necessity that the rank and file disperse
because the generals lay down their arms. Corporals
in such extremity have been known to become
generals; and threatening intimations of that kind are
already "looming" pretty close to Lord Derby's elbow.

Let us give a few examples. First, there is Lord
Derby's own Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster,
Mr. Christopher, who does not scruple to tell his
constituents of Lincolnshire ("that broad Lincolnshire
which Protection created!" as Mr. Disraeli
remarks in his Biography of Bentinck), that he
believes it to be actually Lord Derby's intention
to restore Protection; and that it is solely in consequenceof that belief he consents to remain a member
of the Derby Administration. Then there is Lord
Derby's own Solicitor-general, Sir Fitzroy Kelly, who
tells the farmers of East Suffolk that the effect of
Corn Law Repeal has been to render it impossible
for the cultivator of the soil to carry on with effect
the fearful competition to which he is exposed.
"When I come to the repeal of the Corn Laws," says
Sir Fitzroy, "it is there that I protest, it is there
that I stop, it is there that I deny any substantial
good, and affirm that what followed was unmitigated
evil." However, as the learned Solicitor was a member
of the Administration which proposed the repeal,
and as he did not "protest" on that occasion, and did
"stop" (to vote with Sir Robert Peel, and continue
in receipt of his salary), perhaps Lord Derby on
the present occasion, notwithstanding Sir Fitzroy's
eagerness to "protest," may yet find his objections
to "stop" not altogether insuperable. But then
there is also the Premier's own Home Secretary, who,
though not a man of jokes, is understood to be a man
of conscience,—more difficult to deal with; and who,
in lately talking to his friends at his snug little retreat
of Midhurst, delivered quite a serious homily against
those supposed blessings of Free Trade on which his
colleague, the Chancellor of the Exchequer, had so
brilliantly expatiated only a couple of months before.
Mr. Walpole here deliberately stated his conviction
that Free Trade had increased the number of criminals,
though the returns of his own office lay at his elbow
to contradict him; and as gravely lamented that it
had also increased pauperism, though his colleague
of the Poor Law Board, Sir John Trollope, had a day
or two before declared quite the contrary, on the
hustings at South Lincolnshire. But then this very Sir
John, when Lord Burghley declared a few minutes
afterwards on the same hustings, that the more he
looked at the working of Free Trade principles the
more he felt confirmed in his original view that they
must lead to universal ruin,—calmly listened,
notwithstanding all his better experience at the Poor Law
Board, with such small discomposure, or disposition
to contradict, that he will probably be found equally
tolerant of the flat contradiction of the Home Secretary.
There is likewise Lord Derby's own First
Commissioner of Works, Lord John Manners, who
announces in his poetical way at Colchester that he
is the same under the scorching sun of 1852 that
he was under the bleak winds of 1847;—and there is
the brother of that cabinet minister, Lord George,
who does his best to persuade the poor electors of
Cambridgeshire that heavy import duties only affect
the rich, and that cheapness is an injury and not a
benefit to him whose only capital is labour;—and
there is the same cabinet minister's elder brother,
Lord Granby, who rallies the drooping energies of
North Leicestershire farmers with a bold challenge to
all that have been threatening to abandon Protection,
"Do it if you dare!"—and there is finally the brother
of the deceased hero of Protection, Lord Henry
Bentinck, who not only preaches in North Nottinghamshire
a gospel against Free Trade, but avers that
any other teaching is that of heretics and infidels,
and invokes his fellow-countrymen to combine as one
man with Lord Derby against the progress of those
atrociously democratic sentiments "which had been
unfurled by Sir James Graham at Carlisle, shaken in
the face of Lord Derby by the Duke of Newcastle in
the House of Lords, acknowledged by Mr. Bright on
behalf of the Manchester school, and subscribed to
by Archbishop Cullen on the part of the Irish brigade."

The nobleman who thus placed Sir James Graham,
the Duke of Newcastle, Mr. Bright, and Dr. Cullen,
at the head of the subverters of 'social order in the
three kingdoms, is the same who, six years ago,
charged Sir Robert Peel with having abolished the
corn laws simply for the purpose of increasing his
own private fortune. The reader will therefore not
be surprised at his latest extravagance. But it has
been a peculiarity of this General Election, hardly less
striking than the impossibility of conjecturing its effect
on public questions, that it has revived a habit of