construction of the new Ministry had
been completed, Parliament reassembled on April 18; but that meeting
was little more than of formal character, as the Houses had again to
adjourn in order to enable the new members who were members of the
House of Commons to resign and seek, according to constitutional usage,
for re-election at the hands of their constituents. The only public
interest attaching to the meeting of Parliament on April 18 was found
in an attempt, made by two Tory peers, to extract from Lord Melbourne
some public explanation as to his dealings with O'Connell and the Irish
party. Lord Melbourne was quite equal to the occasion, and nothing
could be drawn from him further than the declaration that he had
entered into no arrangements whatever with O'Connell; that if the Irish
members should, on any occasion, give him their support, he should be
happy to receive it, but that he had not taken and did not mean to take
any steps to secure it. The incident is worth noting because it serves
to illustrate, once again, the effect of the new condition which had
been introduced into the struggles of the two great political parties
by the passing of the Catholic Emancipation Act, and the consequent
admission of Irish Catholic members into the House of Commons.

Some of the members of the new Administration were not successful when
they made their appeal to their old constituencies. Lord John Russell,
for instance, was beaten in South Devonshire by a Tory antagonist, and
a vacancy had to be made for him in the little borough of Stroud, the
representative of which withdrew in order to oblige the leaders of his
party, and obtained, in return for his act of self-sacrifice, an office
under Government. Lord Palmerston was placed in a difficulty of the
same kind, and a vacancy was made for him in the borough of {254}
Tiverton by the good-nature and the public spirit of its sitting
representative, and from that time to the end of his long career Lord
Palmerston continued to be the member for Tiverton, which indeed won,
by that fact alone, a conspicuous place in Parliamentary history.
There were other disturbances of the same kind in the relations of the
members of the new Government and their former constituents, and it was
clear enough that a certain reaction was still working against the
political impulse which had carried the Reform measures to success.
Still, it was clear that the new Government had come into power as