Studies in Parliament Author:Richard Holt Hutton Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: III. MB. CABDWELL. Mb. Caedwell, more than any living politician, has all the "notes" of a Peelite. Now the Peelites proper were at one time a somewhat remar... more »kable variety among English political species. Of course, as their name imports, they were 'Conservatives with : an avowed preference for the late Sir Robert Peel's policy of- relaxation—" soft shell " Conservatives, as the Americans might say. The same tendency which made them prefer the via media opened up by Sir Robert Peel between a Liberal and Tory policy to either of those opposite schools, inclined many of them — Mr. Gladstone and Lord Herbert, for instance, and we believe also Mr. Cardwell—to the same sort of via media on ecclesiastical matters, and made them at one time more or less of Puseyites. They shrank too decidedly from the adoption of a clear, distinguishing principle, to take up either with the unqualified principle of authority in Church matters or the unqualified principle of individual inquiry; and they more or less preferred to test by I expediency, by results, the extent to which they were prepared to go in admitting the modifying influence of the one principle on the other. In Mr. Gladstone, however, it seems probable that warm popular sympathies, though for a time kept down beneath the superinduced intellectual complexities, were really among the essential elements of his character. He was an orator by nature, and an orator must receive from those whom he addresses, as he himself says, " in vapour, what he pours back upon them in a flood." But the Peelites as Peelites were not properly men of popular sympathies. They were for the most part men with hereditary faculties for business—Sir Bobert Peel himself, Mr. Gladstone, and Mr. Cardwell, all having derived their means from large Lancashire hou...« less