ctate their
own terms.

The most important public measure of Lord Chatham's administration was
his celebrated interference with the corn trade. The harvest had been
bad; the price of food was high; and he thought it necessary to take on
himself the responsibility of laying an embargo on the exportation of
grain. When Parliament met, this proceeding was attacked by the
opposition as unconstitutional, and defended by the ministers as
indispensably necessary. At last an act was passed to indemnify all who
had been concerned in the embargo.

The first words uttered by Chatham, in the House of Lords, were in
defence of his conduct on this occasion. He spoke with a calmness,
sobriety, and dignity well suited to the audience which he was
addressing. A subsequent speech which he made on the same subject was
less successful. He bade defiance to aristocratical connections, with a
superciliousness to which the Peers were not accustomed, and with tones
and gestures better suited to a large and stormy assembly than to the
body of which he was now a member. A short altercation followed, and he
was told very plainly that he should not be suffered to browbeat the old
nobility of England.

It gradually became clearer and clearer that he was in a distempered
state of mind. His attention had been drawn to the territorial
acquisitions of the East India Company, and he determined to bring the
whole of that great subject before Parliament. He would not, however,
confer on the subject with any of his colleagues. It was in vain that
Conway, who was charged with the conduct of business in the House of
Commons, and Charles Townshend, who was responsible for the direction of
the finances, begged for some glimpse of light as to what was in
contemplation. Chatham's answers were sullen and mysterious. He must
decline any discussion with them; he did not want their assistance; he
had fixed on a person to take charge of his measure in the House of
Commons. This person was a member who was not connected with the
government, and who neither had, nor deserved to have, the ear of the
House, a noisy, purse-proud, illiterate demagogue, whose Cockney English
and scraps of mispronounced Latin were the jest of the newspapers,
Alderman Beckford. It may well be supposed that these strange
proceedings produced a ferment through the whole political world. The
city was in commotion. The East India Company invoked the faith of
charters. Burke thundered against t