nstitutional" could be properly applied to the bill on either
ground. There is, indeed, a certain vagueness in the meaning, or at all
events in the frequent use of this adjective. Sometimes it is used to
imply a violation of the provisions of the Great Charter, or of its
later development, the Bill of Rights; sometimes to impute some imagined
departure from the principles which guided the framers of those
enactments. But in neither sense does it seem applicable to this bill.
To designate the infringement or revocation of a charter by such a
description would be to affirm the existence of a right in the sovereign
to invest a charter, from whatever motive it may originally have been
granted, with such a character of inviolability or perpetuity that no
Parliament should, on ever such strong grounds of public good, have the
power of interfering with it. And to attribute such a power to the crown
appears less consistent with the limitations affixed to the royal
prerogative by the constitution, than to regard all trusts created by
the crown as subject to parliamentary revision in the interests of the
entire nation. On the second ground the description seems even less
applicable. An arrangement of patronage is a mere matter of detail, not
of principle. For the minister to propose such an arrangement as should
secure for himself and his party a perpetual monopoly of power and
office might be grasping and arrogant; for Parliament (and Parliament
consists of the sovereign and the peers, as well as of the House of
Commons) to assent to such an arrangement might be short-sighted and
impolitic; but it is not clear that either the minister in proposing
such an enactment, or the Parliament in adopting it, would be violating
either the letter or the spirit of the constitution. Every member of the
Governing Board was to be appointed by the Parliament itself; and,
though unquestionably Fox would have the nomination, and though he could
reckon on the support of the majority in the House of Commons for those
whom he might select, still it was a strictly constitutional machinery
that he was putting in motion.

A measure, however, may be very objectionable without being
unconstitutional, and such a view of the India Bill the progress of the
debates in the House of Commons disposed the King to take of it. In the
House of Peers Lord Thurlow described the bill as one to take the crown
off his head and place it on that of Mr. Fox; and, even witho