MR. PEEL'S CHARGES AGAINST THE EDUCATION COMMITTEE. HOUSE OF COMMONS -JUNE 23, 1819. AFTER the speech of the Right Honourable Gentleman, the House, I feel confident, will extend its indulgence to me. Suddenly called upon, without any the least notice, to defend my individual conduct, and that of my colleagues in the Committee, whose confidence I am proud to have enjoyed from the first day that I filled its chair, to the last when I reported its proceedings, I rise under the additional disadvantage of almost every one of its members being absent, to meet, thus unprepared and unsupported, the long premeditated and much-laboured harangue of our accuser, surrounded by those who were doubtless well aware of the charge about to be preferred against us. (Some members here were observed leaving the House.) And, Sir, while I lament the absence of the Committee, I cannot but laud the exemplary conduct of those who, having been present during the attack, are taking this opportunity of departing that they may not listen to the defence. They hardly yield in fairness to their Honourable leader. He, with a singular delicacy and equal fairness, has selected a moment for his onset, when he thought he should catch the accused unprepared, and so have him convicted without a defence. They, contented with listening to the charges, are leaving us, quite satisfied with my inability to repel them. To repel all and each of them, however, I shall instantly proceed. I delay not a moment to perform this duty, which I owe to others no less than to myself; and in order to meet the peculiar fastidiousness which the Right Honourable gentleman has shown on matters of form-to satisfy that very nice and even morbid sense of order by which he is tormented, and of which he has made so mighty a parade in his solemn lecture upon Parliamentary procedure-I begin by stating that, before I sit down, I shall move to refer the Education Committee's report to a Committee of the whole House. I feel, indeed, my situation to be almost unexampled. Without any kind of notice anything that could give me a suspicion of such a discussion by possibility arising, as that into which I am thus hurried; without reflection or preparation, or one document, or a single note to help my memory of the details, I am called upon to answer a laboured and artificial invective against my conduct and that of my colleagues, from the year 1816, down to the present day. But meet it I must. I well know how I should be treated, were I to withdraw from the conflict. It would be said that the Right Honourable gentleman's observations were too strong to be faced-that they cut too deep, and went too near the bone-that they were not loose insinuations or vague invectives-that his performance was not composed of schoolboy rant or college declamation—that he, a business-like personage, gave chapter and verse for all he alleged, dealing largely in names and dates; and if his charges were left unanswered, it was only because they were unanswerable. The Committee's absence would be accounted no reason for delay; I, at least, it would be said, was present, and could require no notice of that which I should at al times be prepared to defend-my past conduct, no matter how arraigned, or how unexpectedly the charge so maturely prepared, so industriously gathered from so many quarters, might have been brought forward against us. Wherefore I enter forthwith upon my defence against that lecture, the produce of the daily toil, the midnight oil, of the Right Honourable gentleman, aided probably by sundry fellows of colleges, who never crossed the precincts of their Vice-Chancellor's peculiar jurisdiction, and certainly distinguished by all that knowledge of the law, and of the customs of Parliament, which might be looked for in those academical authorities. The Right Honourable gentleman has charged me with grave offences, which he has visited with what he doubtless considered as a punishment adequate to the gravest of crimes the weight of his censure—a censure delivered almost as if it had proceeded from the Chair; and which, I must say in passing, would have been nearly as forcible, though it probably would have been less solemn, had it fallen from the chair. In circumstances so unprecedented, gentlemen are now most unexpectedly called upon to decide against the Committee's reports, and against my conduct and that of my excellent colleagues, and against the conduct of this House, during two successive sessions, both as regards our acts and deeds, and as regards our omissions. But if I do not now satisfy all who hear me, that the committee were right, that I was right, that this House was right, and the Right Honourable gentleman wrong --if I do not succeed in proving to the heart's content of every one man of common candour and ordinary understanding, that the Right Honourable gentleman is utterly wrong in all his charges wrong from the beginning to the end of his laboured oration-if I do not in a few minutes, and by referring to a few plain matters, strip that performance of all claim to credit— if I do not show him to be mistaken in his facts, out in his dates, at fault in his law, ignorant of all Parliamentary precedent and practice, grossly uninformed, perhaps misinformed, upon the whole question which in an evil hour he has undertaken to handle, with no |