ng its own authors could
hardly have recognized it as the work of their hands. The peers not
only restored all, or nearly all, the abuses and anomalies which the
measure as it left the House of Commons had marked for utter abolition,
but they even went so far as to introduce into their version of the
Bill some entirely new and original suggestions for the creation of
abuses up to that time unknown to the existing municipal system.

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The Bill thus diversified had, of course, to go back to the House of
Commons, and it is hardly necessary to say that the House of Commons
could not, as the Parliamentary phrase goes, agree with the Lords'
amendments. Peel once again took a statesmanlike course, and strongly
advised the House of Lords not to press their absurd and objectionable
alterations. In the House of Lords itself the Duke of Wellington,
acting as he almost always did under the influence of Peel, recommended
the Tory peers not to carry their opposition too far, and before long
Lord Lyndhurst, who was by temperament and intellect a very shrewd and
practical man, with little of the visionary or the fanatic about him,
thought it well to accept Wellington's advice, and to urge its
acceptance on his brother Conservatives. Lord John Russell recommended
the House of Commons to accept a compromise on a few insignificant
details in no wise affecting the general purposes of the measure, in
order to soothe the wounded feelings of the peers and enable them to
yield with the comforting belief that after all their resistance had
not been wholly in vain. The struggle was over, and on September 7,
1835, the measure became law in the same shape, to all practical
purposes, as that which it wore when it left the House of Commons after
its third reading there, and thus secured for Great Britain and Ireland
the system of municipal government which has been working to this day.

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CHAPTER LXXVIII.

STILL THE REIGN OF REFORM.

[Sidenote: 1836--The Universities of London]

The movement for the diffusion of education among the people had been
making steady progress during the reign of William the Fourth, and some
of the most distinct and lasting memorials of that movement have come
to be associated with the history of the reign. One of these was the
granting of a charter for the establishment of a great university which
was to bear the name of the capital, and was to confer its degrees, its
honors, and its offices