My belief is, that a wiser decision than that to which you came—to subject property to direct taxation within certain limits—to remove the prohibitio… - Robert Peel

It was impossible to reconcile the repeal of the Corn Laws by me with the keeping together of the Conservative party, and I had no hesitation in sacrificing the subordinate object, and with it my own political interests.

...if wheat were at this moment subject to a duty of twenty shillings the quarter, and if Indian corn were virtually excluded, next winter would not pass without a convulsion endangering the whole frame of society, without the humiliation of constituted authorities forced to yield after a disgraceful struggle...if their [the Protectionists'] advice had been taken, we should have had famine prices for many articles, and a state of exasperated public feeling and just agitation, which it would require wiser heads than theirs to allay. So far from regretting the expulsion from office, I rejoice in it as the greatest relief from an intolerable burden. To have your own way, and to be for five years the Minister of this country in the House of Commons, is quite enough for any man's strength. He is entitled to his discharge, from length of service. But to have to incur the deepest responsibility, to bear the heaviest toil, to reconcile colleagues with conflicting opinions to a common course of action, to keep together in harmony the Sovereign, the Lords and the Commons; to have to do these things, and to be at the same time the tool of a party—that is to say, to adopt the opinions of men who have not access to your knowledge, and could not profit by it if they had, who spend their time in eating and drinking, and hunting, shooting, gambling, horse-racing, and so forth—would be an odious servitude, to which I will never submit. I determine to keep aloof from party combinations.

Each town and each country will command the amount of currency which it requires for its own purposes, undisturbed in the slightest degree by consulting its manifest interest, namely, by purchasing that which it wants in the cheapest market. [Derisive cheers.] Yes, by purchasing that which it wants in the cheapest market. You consider this a very low and unworthy principle; that it is a doctrine of the Manchester school; that it is a novel doctrine of some speculative political philosophers, and that it may be safely rejected. But this doctrine of purchasing in the cheapest market is not a doctrine of speculative philosophers only. It is not a doctrine introduced by modern economists. It is, no doubt, a doctrine sanctioned expressly and directly by the authority of Adam Smith. It is the doctrine of Say and of Hume. It is opposed to a doctrine which was fashioned some eighty or ninety years since, of which such writers as Montesquieu and Voltaire were the patrons; but Smith, and Say, and Hume, demonstrated the true principles which ought to regulate the commercial policy of a nation.