Politics & Power Quote by Robert Peel

Agitation, in Peel's telling, is not a mob in the street but a lever: the deliberate conversion of moral feeling into legislative force. The line is built to legitimize pressure from below while disciplining it. "Marshalling" is the giveaway. It borrows the language of command and organization, recasting public unrest as something that can be ordered, deployed, and ultimately made useful to the state. Conscience is framed as a national resource; laws are the moldable output. That is a remarkably modern view of politics as an assembly line where sentiment becomes statute.

The subtext is a conservative reformer's tightrope walk. Peel led a Britain rattled by industrialization, mass petitioning, and the memory of revolutionary upheaval across the Channel. He helped create the modern police and navigated seismic changes like Catholic Emancipation and the repeal of the Corn Laws. In that world, agitation could look like chaos or like the only language power understood. Peel's sentence offers a third option: agitation as a constitutional instrument, a way to avoid rupture by translating grievance into reform before it detonates.

It also flatters "the nation" as a single moral actor, smoothing over class conflict by implying a unified conscience waiting to be organized. That rhetorical move matters: it turns contentious movements into proof of national health, not national fracture. Peel isn't praising noise for its own sake; he's defending the noisy mechanisms that keep a system adaptable enough to survive.