1832.] Canning's Premiership to Passing of Reform Act, 205 tion of a nation's tendencies are no more to be kept back than the flow of the tide can be restrained. So Wellington, who was properly described as "the strongest and most peremptory man of all," was not able to realize the hopes of the re- actionaries and put a stop at once to the progress of reform. He could not, or he did not try to, even form a distinctly Tory Ministry. The Whigs, indeed, who had allied themselves with Canning and Goderich, were dismissed, and Tierney and Scarlett went once more into opposition ; but the Canningites, not less hateful to the true Tory, remained in office. Huskisson, Dudley, Palmerston, and Grant kept their places ; and poor Lord Eldon, who had looked to the accession of Wellington as the sign of coming triumph, sat at home, waiting in vain for the realization of his hopes. He was the representative of the party of blind resistance which had already become antiquated, and was not even asked to join the Government. There was a popular outcry, not because Huskisson and his friends were asked to keep office, but because they con- sented to do so. They justified themselves by the assurance that the policy of their old leader was to be continued. A little prescience would have enabled them to say that it was destined to be exceeded in Liberalism. Parliament met on the 29th of January, 1828, the King's speech being chiefly remarkable for speaking of the battle of Navarino as " an untoward event." It was in the debate on the address that the Canningites made their explanations, and Russell replied in sarcastic terms to the eulogy of Wellington, with which Palmerston accompanied the defence of his own conduct an episode not without interest at the time, but made still more noteworthy by the subsequent history of the two men. The chief event of the session was one which helped to prove how little the greatest men can do in the face of a national movement, and how the wisest are often at a loss to understand its real power and meaning. When Canning was making a declaration of his policy, he had declared that he intended to strenuously resist the repeal of the Test and Corporation Acts. It might well have been supposed that
