have been a magnificent fortune for a Prince
of Wales in the earlier part of the last century. On the other hand,
George the Second was literally stuffed and bloated with money. He had
between eight and nine hundred thousand a year, and his wife was richly
provided for. Odious bad taste, selfishness, and griping avarice were
exhibited on both sides of the dispute; it would be hard to say which
side showed to the lesser advantage. There was much poverty all this
time in London, and indeed over the whole country. Trade was depressed;
employment was hard to get; within a stone's-throw of St. James's Palace
men, women, and children were living in a chronic condition of
semi-starvation. The Court and the Parliament were wrangling fiercely
over the question whether a king with a revenue of nearly a million could
afford to give his eldest son an extra fifty thousand a year, and whether
a Prince of Wales could live in decency on fifty-three thousand a year.
The patient, cool-headed people of England who knew of all this--such of
them as did--and who hated both king and prince alike, yet put up with
the whole thing simply because they had come to the conviction that
nothing was to be gained by any attempt at a change. They had been
passing through so many changes, they had been the victims of so many
experiments, that they had not the slightest inclination to venture on
any new enterprise. They preferred to bear the ills they had; but they
knew that they were ills, and put on no affectation of a belief that they
were blessings.

The debate in the House of Lords took place on Friday, February 25th.
Lord Carteret proposed the motion for the Address to the King, and went
over much of the {90} same historical ground that Pulteney had traversed
in the Commons. The Duke of Newcastle replied in his usual awkward and
bungling fashion, with the uneasy attitudes and clownish gestures which
were characteristic of him. He was not able to make any effective use of
the King's message, and the Lord Chancellor read it for him. The
division in the House of Lords showed seventy-nine votes and twenty-four
proxies for the King, in all one hundred and three; and twenty-eight
votes and twelve proxies for the prince, in all forty; the King had a
majority, therefore, of sixty-three. Some of the peers, among them Lord
Carteret and Lord Chesterfield, signed a protest against the decision of
the House. The protest is like so many other protes