lifted by it into an almost solitary greatness.

[Sidenote: Fall of the Coalition.]

But in Parliament Pitt was as powerless as he was influential in the
country. His renewed proposal of Parliamentary Reform, though he set
aside the disfranchisement of rotten boroughs as a violation of private
property, and limited himself to the disfranchisement of boroughs
convicted of corruption, and to the addition of one hundred members to
the county representation, was rejected by a majority of two to one.
Secure in their parliamentary majority, and heedless of the power of
public opinion outside the walls of the House of Commons, the new
Ministers entered boldly on a greater task than had as yet taxed the
constructive genius of English statesmen. To leave such a dominion as
Warren Hastings had built up in India to the control of a mere Company
of traders was clearly impossible; and Fox proposed to transfer its
political government from the Directors of the Company to a board of
seven Commissioners. The appointment of the seven was vested in the
first instance in Parliament, and afterwards in the Crown; their office
was to be held for five years, but they were removable on address from
either House of Parliament. The proposal was at once met with a storm of
opposition. The scheme indeed was an injudicious one; for the new
Commissioners would have been destitute of that practical knowledge of
India which belonged to the Company, while the want of any immediate
link between them and the actual Ministry of the Crown would have
prevented Parliament from exercising an effective control over their
acts. But the real faults of this India Bill were hardly noticed in the
popular outcry against it. It had challenged the hostility of powerful
influences. The merchant-class was galled by the blow levelled at the
greatest merchant-body in the realm: corporations trembled at the
cancelling of a charter; the king viewed the measure as a mere means of
transferring the patronage of India to the Whigs. But it might have
defied the opposition of corporations and the king had it not had to
meet the bitter hostility of the nation at large. With the nation the
faults of the bill lay not in this detail or that, but in the character
of the Ministry which proposed it. To give the rule and patronage of
India over to the existing House of Commons was to give a new and
immense power to a body which misused in the grossest way the power it
possessed. It was