Canning had
more than once asserted his conviction that the public business would be
more satisfactorily conducted when the Prime-minister was a commoner,
founding his opinion chiefly on the paramount importance of financial
questions, the discussion of which is almost confined to the House of
Commons, and conceiving it to be supported by the history of the
administration of Pitt, from whom, indeed, he had imbibed the idea; and
in former years Peel had more than once expressed his concurrence with
that view of the subject. But, from papers which were intrusted to him
for the execution of his great work, Sir Theodore Martin learned that
Peel had subsequently found reason to come to the opposite conclusion,
not from any change in his view of the relative importance of the
different departments of administration, but solely because "the amount
of work imposed upon the first minister in the House of Commons, in
addition to what he had to go through elsewhere, was too great for any
human strength. In the House of Lords the Prime-minister would escape
the necessity for being in a position to vindicate all the details of
administration, and to answer the multiplicity of questions on all sorts
of subjects, the putting of which has almost degenerated into a vice. He
had, therefore, come to the conclusion that it was there he ought to
be.
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