es to that of Prime-minister,
and, as is admitted even by those who dissented most widely from some of
his opinions and actions, earned for himself an honorable reputation, as
one who had rendered faithful services to the crown, and on more than
one occasion had conferred substantial benefits on the country.

The arrangements proposed with respect to the Peers were not opposed.
But Mr. Grey--generally acting as the spokesman of the Opposition on
this question--raised an objection to making so large an addition as
that of one hundred new members to the British House of Commons. He
repeated his prophecy, made on a previous occasion, of the subserviency
to the minister which the Irish members might be expected to exhibit,
and therefore moved an amendment to reduce the number of Irish
representatives to eighty-five; but, to obviate the discontent which
such a reduction might be expected to excite in Ireland, he proposed to
diminish the number of English members also, by disfranchising forty "of
the most decayed boroughs," a step which would leave the number of
members in the new united Parliament as nearly as possible the same as
it was before. He found, however, very few to agree with him; his
amendment was rejected by 176 to 34; and the minister's proposal was
adopted in all its details.

Mr. Pitt touched lightly on the next article, which limited the royal
prerogative of creating Peers by a provision that the King should never
confer any fresh Irish peerage till three peerages should have become
extinct. This, again, was a point of difference between the conditions
of the Scotch and Irish Unions; since by the terms of the Scotch Union
the King was forever debarred from creating any new Scotch peerages. But
it was pointed out that the greater antiquity of the Scotch peerages,
and the circumstance that in Scotland the titles descended to collateral
branches, were calculated to make the extinction of a Scotch peerage an
event of very rare occurrence; while the comparative newness (with very
few exceptions) of Irish peerages, and the rule by which they are
"confined to immediate male descendants," rendered the entire extinction
of the Irish peerage probable, "if the power of adding to or making up
the number were not given to the crown."

Recent legislation has given such importance to the next resolution,
that it will be well to quote his precise words:

"5. That it would be fit to propose, as the fifth article of union,