onsideration of the matter for four months; and the charge the Duke of
Bolton was shelved in a somewhat similar manner.

Even had these peers and such practices been censured with the very
greatest severity, the censures could have had but a very limited
effect. But it was on measures of a wider scope, embracing what began to
be called a Reform of Parliament, that the more zealous members of the
Opposition placed their chief reliance. As far as our records of the
debates can be trusted, Lord Chatham, ten years before, had given the
first hint of the desirableness of some alteration of the existing
system. On one occasion he denounced the small boroughs as "the rotten
part of the constitution," thus originating the epithet by which they in
time came to be generally described; but more usually he disavowed all
idea of disfranchising them, propounding rather a scheme for diminishing
their importance by a large addition to the county members. However, he
never took any steps to carry out his views, thinking, perhaps, that it
was not in the Upper House that such a subject should be first broached.
But he had not been long in the grave, when a formal motion for a reform
of a different kind was brought forward by one of the members for the
City of London, Alderman Sawbridge,[59] who, in May, 1780, applied for
leave to bring in "a bill for shortening the duration of Parliaments."
His own preference he avowed to be for annual Parliaments; but his
suspicion that the House would think such a measure too sweeping had
induced him to resolve to content himself with aiming at triennial
Parliaments. As leave was refused, the bill proposed to be introduced
may, perhaps, be thought disentitled to mention here, were it not that
the circumstance that proposals for shortening the duration of
Parliaments are still occasionally brought forward seems to warrant an
account of a few of the arguments by which those who took the leading
parts in the debate which ensued resisted it. The minister, Lord North,
declared that the Alderman had misunderstood the views of our ancestors
on the subject; as their desire had been, not that Parliament should be
elected annually, but that it should sit every year, an end which had
now been attained. Fox, on the other hand, while avowing that hitherto
he had always opposed similar motions, declared his wish now to see not
only triennial but annual Parliaments, as the sole means of lessening
the influence of the c