e extinguished by
putting an end to purchase, what has been chiefly considered is
how to proceed with the greatest certainty and the smallest shock,
and how to secure as far as may be for the officers all that has
hitherto been asked on their behalf. With this view, the
government think the first step would be to abolish the warrant
under which prices of commissions are fixed. As the resolution of
the House of Lords states the unwillingness of the House to take
part in abolishing purchase until certain things shall have been
done, it would not be applicable to a case in which, without its
interposition, purchase would have been already abolished.

Two days later (July 17) the Lords passed what Sir Roundell Palmer called
"their ill-advised resolution." On July 18 the cabinet met and resolved to
recommend the cancelling of the old warrant regulating purchase, by a new
warrant abolishing purchase. It has been said or implied that this
proceeding was forced imperiously upon the Queen. I find no evidence of
this. In the language of Lord Halifax, the minister in attendance, writing
to Mr. Gladstone from Osborne (July 19, 1871), the Queen "made no sort of
difficulty in signing the warrant" after the case had been explained. In
the course of the day she sent to tell Lord Halifax, that as it was a
strong exercise of her power in apparent opposition to the House of Lords,
she should like to have some more formal expression of the advice of the
cabinet than was contained in an ordinary letter from the prime minister,
dealing with this among other matters. Ministers agreed that the Queen had
a fair right to have their advice on such a point of executive action on
her part, recorded in a formal and deliberate submission of their opinion.
The advice was at once clothed in the definite form of a minute.

On July 20 Mr. Gladstone announced to a crowded and anxious House the
abolition of purchase by royal warrant. The government, he said, had no
other object but simplicity and despatch, and the observance of
constitutional usage. Amid some disorderly interruptions, Mr. Disraeli
taunted the government with resorting to the prerogative of the crown to
get out of a difficulty of their own devising. Some radicals used the same
ill-omened word. After a spell of obstruction on the ballot bill, the
bitter discussion on purchase revived, and Mr. Disraeli said that what had
occurred early in the evening