My memory and observation of public affairs are about coeval with that event [the French Revolution<nowiki>]</nowiki>. I was in my ninth year when th… - John Wilson Croker

Even though the East Retford case had never happened, or even though it had been decided in a different way, there occurred subsequently other events, as we shall by and by show, which would inevitably have brought us to the present crisis; which, we repeat, has been produced by the state of parties, and not by any general desire for Reform in the public mind. It was the state of parties which waked the spirit of Reform, and not Reform which created the state of parties; and it was only as the Retford question happened to operate on the state of parties, that it had any immediate effect on the question of Reform.

The fatal consequences are that Peel, by betraying the precise and specific principle upon which he was brought into office, has ruined the character of public men, and dissolved, by dividing, the great landed interest—the only solid foundation on which any Government can be formed in this country. I care comparatively little about his actual corn law experiment; it will fail, and England will right herself from this fraudulent humbug; but while that process is going on, we shall be running all the risks, if not suffering the actual infliction, of a revolution. On the principle on which we have truckled to the League, how are we to resist the attack on the Irish Church—the Irish Union—both much worse cases (in that view) than the Corn Laws. How to maintain primogeniture, the Bishops, the House of Lords, the Crown? Sir Robert Peel has put these into more peril than Cobbett, or Cobden, or O'Connell, or they altogether could have done, and his personal influence has carried away individuals; he has broken up the old interests, divided the great families, and commenced just such a revolution as the Noailles and Montmorencies did in 1789. Look at father and son, and brother and brother, and uncle and nephew—thrown into personal hostility in half the counties of England, and all for what?—to propitiate Richard Cobden.

I prefer an ounce of fact to a ton of imagination.