and this
motion was not only carried, but carried without one dissentient voice.
[149]

Those who were most interested in opposing it doubtless saw that
opposition would, at that moment, only irritate the majority, and
reserved themselves for a more favourable time. The more favourable
time soon came. No man of common sense could, when his blood had cooled,
remember without shame that he had voted for a resolution which made no
distinction between sinecurists and laborious public servants, between
clerks employed in copying letters and ministers on whose wisdom
and integrity the fate of the nation might depend. The salary of the
Doorkeeper of the Excise Office had been, by a scandalous job, raised
to five hundred a year. It ought to have been reduced to fifty. On the
other hand, the services of a Secretary of State who was well qualified
for his post would have been cheap at five thousand. If the resolution
of the Commons bad been carried into effect, both the salary which ought
not to have exceeded fifty pounds, and the salary which might without
impropriety have amounted to five thousand, would have been fixed at
five hundred. Such absurdity must have shocked even the roughest and
plainest foxhunter in the House. A reaction took place; and when, after
an interval of a few weeks, it was proposed to insert in a bill of
supply a clause in conformity with the resolution of the twelfth of
December, the Noes were loud; the Speaker was of opinion that they had
it; the Ayes did not venture to dispute his opinion; the senseless
plan which had been approved without a division was rejected without a
division; and the subject was not again mentioned. Thus a grievance so
scandalous that none of those who profited by it dared to defend it
was perpetuated merely by the imbecility and intemperance of those who
attacked it. [150]

Early in the Session the Treaty of Limerick became the subject of a
grave and earnest discussion. The Commons, in the exercise of that
supreme power which the English legislature possessed over all the
dependencies of England, sent up to the Lords a bill providing that no
person should sit in the Irish Parliament, should hold any Irish office,
civil, military or ecclesiastical, or should practise law or medicine
in Ireland, till he had taken the Oaths of Allegiance and Supremacy, and
subscribed the Declaration against Transubstantiation. The Lords were
not more inclined than the Commons to favour the Irish