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classes to have reform: 'The people of England are very quiet if they are left alone; and if they won't, there is a way to make them.' In the opinion of his relative, Mr Wellesley, member for Essex, he was now, on the 16th of May, finding himself mistaken. Mr Wellesley 'was sorry he had shewn so much ignorance of the character of the British people, in supposing that they were not fit to be trusted with those liberties to which we, as reformers, say they are worthily entitled. He had told him so often; and he was astonished that a man of such intelligent mind— a man who had led them on through blood and battle, through danger to victory-should have so mistaken the character of the British people, as to suppose that the red coat could change the character of the man, or to imagine that the soldier was not a citizen.' Some of the yeomanry corps resigned during the critical interval; that of Ware being in such haste to declare themselves on the side of the people, that they assembled immediately on hearing of the retirement of the Whig ministry, and informed the Marquis of Salisbury of their resignations by sending them at midnight to Hatfield House. Of all the forces in the kingdom, the soldiery at Birmingham fixed the most attention, because Birmingham was the foremost place in public observation; because the duke must be able to rely on the soldiery stationed there at such a time, if on any; and because of the reports afloat that the Scots Greys would refuse to act against the people, if called upon.

The officers of the Birmingham Union knew that certain of the Scots Greys were on the union books. Letters were found in the streets of the town, which declared in temperate language that the Greys would do their duty if called on to repress riot, or any kind of outrage, but that they would not act if called on to put down a peaceable public meeting, or to hinder the conveyance to London of any petition, by any number of peaceable persons. Some of these letters contained the strongest entreaties to the people of Birmingham to keep the peace, that they might not compel their sympathising friends among the Greys to act against them. Letters containing similar avowals were sent to the king, to the Duke of Wellington, and to Lord Hill at the war-office. We know this on the testimony of a private of the regiment, who avows himself a party in these proceedings, and who gives us the following clear and impressive account of his own view of the position in which he and his comrades stood; a view which he knew to be shared by many of his comrades, and which he took care should be well understood by the Duke of Wellington: 'The duty of soldiers to protect property and suppress riots expressed then were the opinions which I have since expressed. To write, or say, or think, that in any case we were not to do what we were ordered was a grave offence, nothing short of mutiny. I was aware of that grave fact. I remonstrated with the soldiers who had joined the political union, and succeeded in persuading them to recall their adhesion to it. With the same regard to my own safety, I never went near the political union. Had the time and the circumstances come for us to act according to our design and judgment, and not according to orders, it would have been an occasion great enough

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to risk all that we were risking. It would have been a national necessity. We would have either been shot dead, or triumphant with a nation's thanks upon our heads. For either alternative we were prepared.' This state of preparation being made known at head-quarters on the one hand, and by the whole people of Birmingham and the midland counties through the newspapers on the other, all plans of military coercion in that neighbourhood were clearly frustrated.

The first probation of these soldiers was on the Sunday after the Newhall Hill meeting. At all times hitherto the barrack-yard had been the resort of people who liked 'to see the Greys;' and on the preceding Sunday, 'there were upwards of 5000 people within the gates, most of them well-dressed artisans, all wearing ribbons of light blue knotted in their breasts, indicating that they were members of the political union.' On the next Sunday, the scene was different indeed. The gates were closed; the soldiers were marched to prayers in the forenoon, and their occupation for the rest of the day was rough-sharpening their swords on the grindstone. This was at the time that they were kept supplied with ball-cartridge, and booted and saddled day and night. They were kept so close within their walls at present, that they did not know with any precision what was going forward; but their impression was— and the impression soon became a rumour-that the Birmingham Union was to march for London that night, and that the Greys were to bar its progress. The doubt and dread were not lessened by the nature of their work. The purpose of rough-sharpening the swords was to make them inflict a ragged wound. Not since before the battle of Waterloo had the swords of the Greys undergone the same process. Old soldiers spoke of it and told the young ones. Few words were spoken. We had made more noise, and probably looked less solemn, at prayers in the morning, than we did now grinding our swords. It was the Lord's day, and we were working.'

The union did not start for London that night. It had to hold a meeting the next day. There were then 200,000 persons present. They resolved to pay no taxes till the bill was passed; and they carried a declaration of unappeasable opposition to the faction which had misled the king, and of reasons why the nation should demand the removal of the Duke of Wellington from the royal counsels. This declaration was to have been signed, after legal revision, by all the unionists in the kingdom; but it was not wanted, any more than the jagged swords of the Greys. The Birmingham Union met again on the Wednesday for purposes of thanksgiving.

The debating of the newspapers, and of all assemblages of people, in public and private, as to whether it was or was not true that the army was not to be relied on, was fatal to all reliance on the army, and would have been, if every soldier in the kingdom had been precisely of the duke's way of thinking. It must have been an extreme surprise to the great Captain to find already that if the people would not be quiet, there was not a way to make them so against their will. So it proved, however; and the end of it was that if the duke would not be quiet,

the people had found a way to make him so. On the second day after the grinding of swords—on Tuesday, the 15th-Lords Grey and Althorp intiImated to the two Houses the joyful news that communications were renewed between the sovereign and themselves which rendered it expedient to adjourn till Thursday. The words were scarcely uttered, before there was a rush from the Houses, to spread the tidings. There was no electric telegraph then; but the news flew as by electric agency. By breakfast-time the next morning, placards were up in the streets of Birmingham; and presently the people thronged to Newhall Hill, after bringing Mr Attwood into the town. As by an impulse of the moment, a minister present was asked to offer thanksgiving; and that prayer, that devout expression of gratitude for their bloodless victory, and their privileges as exulting freemen, was felt by the throng to be a fitting sequel to their last week's solemn vow.

It must be some days before the facts could become perfectly known, or the future certainly anticipated; but men felt secure enough of the result to begin to return to their business. There had been a run on the Bank of England to the extent of above £1,000,000 in small sums. Now, this began to flow back again; the weaver stepped into his loom; the blacksmith blew up the fire of his forge; the husbandmen parted off into the fields; and the merchants of London ceased to crowd the footways of Lombard Street all day long.

In forty-eight hours more there was a rumour in London that by some means unknown the peers had been induced to yield. What the conjuration was which brought about such a marvel was not understood at present; except that some unusual exertion of his personal influence had been made by the king. That the good-behaviour of the peers was not absolutely assured, seemed to be shewn by the care with which Lord Grey and his colleagues evaded the question whether they had received any pledge about a creation of peers. By acute observers it was supposed that some method of warning or persuasion had been used by the king; and that he held himself ready, in case of its failure, to create peers to the extent necessary for carrying the bill. This proved to be the truth. The first expedient was successful; and it is entertaining now to see, on looking back to that date, how credit is taken by the Lords who now yielded to this final appeal, for having 'saved the peerage, with what else was left of the constitution.' The final appeal to the Lords -the last practical acknowledgment of their freewill-was in the form of the following circular-letter, dated from St James's Palace, May 17, 1832:

'MY DEAR LORD-I am honoured with his majesty's commands to acquaint your lordship that all difficulties to the arrangements in progress will be obviated by a declaration in the House to-night, from a sufficient number of peers, that, in consequence of the present state of affairs, they have come to the resolution of dropping their further opposition to the Reform Bill; so that it may pass without delay, and as nearly as possible in its present shape. I have the honour, &c. HERBERT TAYLOR.'

This, which was called the king's letter to the waverers, removed all difficulties. It was dated on the Thursday; and on that night the Duke of Wellington made his explanation of the transactions of the preceding week, retiring from the House when he had finished, and absenting himself during all the remaining discussions of the Reform Bill. About 100 peers went out with him, and absented themselves in like manner. On the next Monday, the 21st, the peers resumed the discussion of the bill in committee, the Duke of Newcastle protesting against their assuming such an appearance of free-will as this, and desiring that they would read through the whole bill at once, and pass it as quickly as possible -as men acting under open compulsion. The first division took place the next night, on the question of the separate representation of the Tower Hamlets, when the anti-reformers exhibited their largest minority-36 to 91. But this disheartened them; and on the next night only 15 were present. On Thursday, the 24th, 23 were present. On Wednesday, the 30th, the disfranchising sections of the bill were gone through-the tenderest points where all was painful. These sections were read through with little discussion, and no real opposition; and on the same night the committee finished its business. On the 1st of June the report was received, eighteen peers recording their dissent in a protest. On the 4th, Lord Grey was ill; but he went down to the House to move the third reading of his bill. Unfit for exertion as he was, he was called up by an attack on the administration from Lord Harrowby. When he sat down, it was suddenly, from inability to stand and speak; but his last words on parliamentary reform, though not designed to be the last, were a fitting close to the testimony of his whole political life: 'He trusted that those who augured unfavourably of the bill would live to see all their ominous forebodings falsified, and that, after the angry feelings of the day had passed away, the measure would be found to be, in the best sense of the word, conservative of the constitution.' The majority were 106, the minority 22. The question, "That the bill do pass,' was put and carried; and then a great number of congratulating peers gathered about the venerable minister, who had so majestically conducted to fruition a measure which he had advocated before many of the existing generation of legislators were born, and through long years of discouragement, which ordinary men would have taken for hopelessness. The Commons next day agreed to the few amendments proposed by the Lords, which left untouched the disfranchising and enfranchising clauses; and on Thursday, June 7, the Reform Bill became law, the royal assent being given by a commission, consisting of the lord chancellor, the Marquises of Lansdowne and Wellesley, and Lords Grey, Holland, and Durham.

It is not to be supposed that when Lord Grey received the congratulations of his friends, there was no melancholy mingled with his satisfaction, or that he had no sympathy with the stoutest of his opponents. The provocation caused by the long resistance of the peers to a necessary change, might naturally blind the people at large to a portion of

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their case, and might urge the most lordly of the ministers themselves into a state of popular feeling at which they might afterwards stand surprised. But Lord Grey was too much of a man, too much of a scholar, too much of a peer, not to feel and remember that, by the passage of this act, the ancient glory of the House of his order was declared to have departed. The change could not be prevented. It was rendered so imperative by time, that the course of wisdom was clear-to acquiesce in the change, and to obtain the utmost possible good out of the attendant circumstances. But, however anxious to put an end to the abuses of borough corruption, and the interference of peers with popular representation, such a man as Lord Grey could not but remember the ancient days when the lords of the realm were the parliament of the realm-when there was no middle class, and the peers were the protectors of such popular interests as existed then he could not but remember the majesty of his House during the centuries when the popular element was advancing and expanding; and though that House had of late fallen from its dignity-become adulterated in its quality, and disgraced by too much of ignorance and sordidness in its self-will and its claims-it still was the British House of Peers which was now overborne and humbled, and made conscious that it existed no longer as a vital part of the English constitution, but for the sake of decorum and expediency. It was natural for the people-the large majority of whom contemplate the present and the future in all their interests-to enjoy the signal proof now given of the continuous rise and expansion of the popular element in the nation; but the most that could be expected from Lord Grey was to perceive and provide for the fact in the noblest and the amplest manner. His associations were too much concerned with the past to admit of his rejoicing with an unmingled joy. Many of us who rejoiced without drawback at the time, and held the strongest opinions of the folly and selfishness of the Tory peers, can now see that they really were much to be pitied; that it was true that the balance of the constitution was destroyed;' and that the change was something audacious and unheard of. In as far as these things were true, the Conservative peers had a claim to the sympathy of all thoughtful persons in their regrets. Their fault and folly laythat fault and folly which deprived them of popular sympathy-in supposing that the operations of time could be resisted, and their own position maintained, by a mere refusal to give way. They lost more than they need have done by a foolish and ungracious resistance, which served but to complete and to proclaim their humiliation. It is a fact not to be denied, that, as the kingly power had before descended to a seat lower than that of parliament, the House of Peers now took rank in the government below the Commons. It will ever stand in history that the House of Commons became the true governing power in Great Britain in 1832, and that from that date the other powers existed, not by their own strength, but by a general agreement founded on considerations as well of broad utility, as of decorum and ancient affection. In as far as the House of Peers

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was now proved to be destined henceforward-as the royal function had for some time been-to exist only by consent of the people at large, it might be truly said that the constitution was destroyed; and the prime-minister who had conducted the process could not be insensible, even in the moment of his triumph, to the seriousness and antiquarian melancholy of the fact, however convinced he might be of the historical glories which were to arise out of it. By the Reform Bill, as passed, the representative system of the British Islands became this:

In England, the county constituencies, which had before been fifty-two, returning ninety-four members, were now increased by the division of counties to eighty-two constituencies, returning 159 members. In Ireland there was no change. In Scotland, the number of constituencies and members remained as before, but some shifting took place to secure a more equitable representation. The great increase in the county representation is the chief of those features which would soon cause the measure to be calledas Lords Grey and Althorp predicted-'the most aristocratic measure that ever passed the House of Commons.'

All boroughs whose population was, according to the census of 1831, under 2000, were disfranchised. Fifty-six English boroughs, which before returned 111 members, were thus extinguished as constituencies. Such boroughs as had a population under 4000, and had hitherto returned two representatives, were now to have one. These being thirty in number, thirty members were thus reduced. The united boroughs of Weymouth and Melcombe Regis were now to send two members instead of four; and thus was the total reduction of 143 old borough members provided for.

As the total number of representatives was not to be altered, as decided by the House of Commons, the 143 were to be distributed over new or newly arranged constituencies. New and large constituencies in England and Wales received 63. The metropolitan districts and other boroughs with a population of 25,000 and upwards, were now to return two members each; and these took up 22 more. The remaining 21 were to be returned by 21 boroughs whose population amounted to 12,000 and upwards. In Ireland, the increase of the representation was only from 35 to 39 members; with an additional member given to Dublin University. In Scotland, there was much redistribution of the franchise, and change in the formation of constituencies; and the number of town representatives was raised from 15 to 23.

There was much changing of boundaries where a population had grown up outside the old limits, and fixing of limits to the boroughs which had a large new population.

Improvements were made in the practice of issuing writs for new elections, and in the conduct of elections, by the ordaining of convenient polling districts, and the shortening of the time of polling in contested elections. The term of fifteen polling days in county elections was shortened to two in England, Wales, and Scotland, and five in Ireland; and instead of the old process of scrutiny, which