ABSTRACT
Antony Ashley Cooper diary records the tumult of hope and fear, of beckoning ambition and rebuking conscience in which he had been living from day to day, and he knew at once that the threat would settle his fate. Ashley can be seen in the mirror of his diary drawing himself up to his full height, steeling his resolution, making ready to put Satan behind him, when Satan should appear, power and pomp in hand. Ashley represented the evangelical reaction from that temper; he had the brooding and sometimes morbid imagination of the revivalist, with his habit of putting his own conscience into a hair shirt and of seeking to do the same service to his friends. Ashley’s saying of him that all his affinities were towards capitalism was true in a sense, for Peel held fixedly that the only way to help the worker was to develop the commercial prosperity of the country.
