ke, who,
with a strange imprudence, had claimed a monopoly of the title of
"friends of the constitution" for himself and his party, and had sneered
at the country gentlemen, as "statesmen of a very different description,
though, by a late description given of them, a Tory was now the best
species of Whig." And the union of the two bodies proved irresistible;
the bill was carried by a majority of sixty-two, and the government did
not venture to carry on their resistance to it in the House of Lords,
any interference by which would, indeed, have been resented by the
Commons, as a violation of their privileges.

At first the duration of the bill was limited to seven years; but in
1774 it was made perpetual by a still larger majority, the experience of
its working having converted many who had at first opposed it, but who
now bore willing testimony to its efficacy. Unhappily, though the House
could make the bill perpetual, at least till formally repealed, it could
not invest its good effects with equal durability. After a time, the
same complaints were advanced against the decision of election
committees that had formerly been employed to discredit the judgments of
the whole House. The success or failure of a petition again became a
party question; and as in a committee of an odd number the
ministerialists or the Opposition must inevitably have a majority of at
least one member, before the end of the reign it had become as easy to
foretell the result of a petition from the composition of the committee
as it had been in the time of Walpole. And it was with the approval of
almost all parties--an approval extorted only by the absolute necessity
of the case--that, after one or two modifications of Mr. Grenville's act
had been tried, Mr. Disraeli induced the House to surrender altogether
its privilege of judging of elections, and to submit the investigations
of petitions on such subjects to the only tribunal sufficiently above
suspicion to command and retain the confidence of the nation, the judges
of the high courts of law.

We shall probably be doing the House of Commons of the day no injustice,
if we surmise that the degree in which public attention had recently
been directed to the representation, and the interest which the people
were beginning to show in the purity of elections, as the principle on
the maintenance of which the very liberties of all might depend, had
some share in leading the House to establish the wholly n