IV
The subject to which he now particularly devoted himself was the most useful that he could have chosen. We had at the time he entered office a police that was notoriously inefficient; prisons, which by their discipline and condition were calculated rather to increase crime than to act as a corrective to it; and laws which rendered society more criminal than the criminals it punished. One can scarcely, in fact, believe that such men as Lord Eldon and Lord Ellenborough did not think it safe to abolish the punishment of death in the case of privately stealing six shillings in a shop; and it is with a shudder that one reads of fourteen persons being hanged in London in one week in 1820, and of thirty-three executions in the year 1822.
No one reflected whether the punishment was proportionate to the offence; no one considered that the alleged criminal himself was a member of the community, and had as much right to be justly dealt with and protected against wrong as the community itself. Satisfied with the last resort of hanging, the State neglected to take suitable precautions against the committal of those acts which led to hanging; nor did it seem a matter of moment to make places of confinement places of reformation, as well as places of atonement. To Bentham, Romilly, Mackintosh, Basil Montagu, and others, we owe that improvement in the public mind which led finally to an improvement in our laws. Mr. Peel had marked and felt this gradual change of opinion; and almost immediately after he became invested with the functions of the Home Department, he promised to give his most earnest attention to the state of the police, the prisons, and the penal laws; a promise that, in the four or five succeeding years, he honourably fulfilled; thus giving to philanthropic ideas that practical sanction with men of the world, which theories acquire by being taken up by men in power.
It is true that the country was, as I have observed, becoming desirous for the changes that Mr. Peel introduced, and that he never advocated them until, owing to the efforts of others, they had won their way with the good and the thoughtful; but it is likewise true that, so soon as they became practically possible, he took them up with zeal, and carried them against a considerable and, as it was then deemed, respectable opposition, which held fœtid dungeons, decrepid watchmen, and a well-fed gallows to be essential appendages to the British constitution.
During this time also he supported, though not conspicuously, the liberal foreign policy of Mr. Canning, and the liberal commercial policy of Mr. Huskisson. He kept, nevertheless, at the head of his own section in the Ministry, as well by his consistent opposition to the Catholic claims as by his defence of Lord Eldon, whose slowness in the administration of justice and obstinate adherence to antiquated doctrines were frequently the subject of attack. This remarkable man, one of the many emanations of the Johnsonian mind which contrived to make the most narrow-minded prejudices palatable to the most comprehensive intellect, exercised great influence over the King, over the older peers and members of the House of Commons, and over that large mass of uncertains that rallies round a man who entertains no scruples and doubts. Mr. Peel took care, however, not to pass for a mere follower of Lord Eldon, nor a mere bigot of the ultra-Protestant party. In defending and lauding the great judge and lawyer, he said expressly: “The House will remember I have nothing to do on this occasion with the political character of the Lord Chancellor:” and again, in discussing the question of proselytism and education, he not only ridiculed the idea that some extravagant people entertained of making Catholic Ireland Protestant, but stated in so many words, “that he was for educating Catholics and Protestants together under one common system, from which proselytism should be honestly and studiously excluded.” His conduct on this occasion merited particular attention. The great difficulty which he foresaw in passing Catholic emancipation was the hostile feeling between Catholics and Protestants. If that feeling was removed, and a common education secured—the best mode of modifying or removing it—the practical and political objections to Catholic emancipation ceased.