...are in a sense but apparently evil. 2 So Peel, writing to Croker in 1820, described public opinion as "that great compound of folly, weakness, prejudice,...right feeling, obstinacy and newspaper paragraphs." * Colloquies, ii. , pp. 47-48. civil government, that no temporal advantage is derived from civil government,...

...remember Sir Robert Peel's words a dozen years before the first Reform Bill: "The tone of England— of that great compound of folly, weakness, prejudice,...obstinacy, and newspaper paragraphs, which is called public opinion."4 If this was a true story in 1820 are we so much lower to-day? And before being too sharp...

...government by public opinion. He thought it was | Sir Robert Peel who spoke of public opinion as a great compound of folly, weakness, prejudice, wrong...right feeling, obstinacy, and newspaper paragraphs. He (Mr Morley) would be sorry | if he thought at this time of day that that was the whole story of...

...Peel hardly measured its breadth and depth when with cynical insight he described public opinion as "that great compound of folly, weakness, prejudice,...right feeling, obstinacy, and newspaper paragraphs." /^Public opinion is not very old. It is the child Public opinion & of the art of printing, of modern...

...important means to the formation and expression of what Sir Robert Peel once somewhat cynically called "that great compound of folly, weakness, prejudice,...newspaper paragraphs, which is called public opinion." And the record of a people's varying public opinion in political matters, it may be asserted, gives...

...it probably ever was. Public opinion is still, it seems, as Sir Robert Peel described it to be: "a compound of folly, weakness, prejudice, wrong feeling,...right feeling, obstinacy, and newspaper paragraphs," 1 — particularly the paragraphs. Once we thought that the printingpress was the beginning of democracy,...

...so lately as two generations ago, looked on it with some distrust or dislike. Sir Robert Peel, 0 5 for instance, in a letter written in 1820, speaks,...Yet opinion has really been the chief and ultimate 10 power in nearly all nations at nearly all times. I do not mean merely the opinion of the class to...

...Radical unrest. " Do you not think," wrote Peel to a fellow Tory in 1820, " that the tone of England — of that great compound of folly, weakness, prejudice,...newspaper paragraphs which is called public opinion — is more liberal, to use an odious but intelligible phrase, than the policy of the Government ?...

...paid the following tribute to the rise of this new force: " Do you not think that the tone of England, of that great compound of folly, weakness, prejudice, wrong feeling, right feeling, obstinacy, or newspaper paragraphs, which is called public opinion, is more liberal — to use an odious but intelligible...

...dozen years before 1832 and the first Reform Bill, Sir Robert Peel spoke of " the tone of England — of that great compound of folly, weakness, prejudice,...newspaper paragraphs, which is called public opinion." Yet what statesman has made it the instrument of wiser reforms ? In considering, however, a more or less...