e loans they raised." The revenue derived
from charitable estates had been "no less scandalously mismanaged." And
the bill provided for the appointment of finance committees, trustees,
auditors, and a regular publication of all the accounts, as the only
efficient remedy and preventive of such abuses. The whole police of the
town and administration of justice was also to be completely under the
control of the council; and for the appointment of magistrates the
council was to have the power of recommending to the crown those whom
they thought fit to receive the commission of the peace; and in the
large towns it should have power also to provide a salary for
stipendiary magistrates. Another clause provided that towns which could
not as yet be included in the bill, since they had never been
incorporated, might obtain charters of incorporation by petition to the
Privy Council.

Such were the general provisions of this great measure of reform; a bill
similar in principle having already been enacted for Scotland, and
another being shortly after passed, with such variations of detail as
the differences in the circumstances of the country required, for
Ireland. Some of the clauses, especially those which preserved the
vested rights of freemen and their families, and which required a
certain amount of property or rating qualifications in the town
councillors, were not originally included in the bill, but were inserted
as amendments in the House of Lords; and it may be remarked that the
result of the discussion in that House afforded a proof of the sagacity
of those peers who, though conscientiously opposed to the Reform Bill,
preferred allowing it to pass by their own retirement from the final
divisions to driving the minister to carry his point by a creation of
peers, since the avoidance of such an addition to their numbers as had
been threatened enabled them now to force the adoption of these
amendments on a reluctant minister. And it seems difficult to deny that
the first was required by justice, and that the second was most
desirable in the interests of the measure itself. Without it the town
councillors, from among whom the mayor was to be chosen, might have been
selected from the poorest, the least educated, and least independent
class of the rate-payers. In some boroughs, or in some wards of many
boroughs, it may be regarded as certain that they would have been so
chosen; and such an admixture of unfit persons would have t