itical necessity rather than of sound policy. The
proposals for appropriation were so moderate that little would have been
lost by dropping or gained by carrying them, but, moderate as they were,
they embodied a principle on which either party was resolved to stand or
fall. The consequence might have been foreseen. The bill, as a whole,
was passed in the house of commons, and even read a second time in the
house of lords, after which the appropriation clauses were rejected in
that assembly by a large majority. Thereupon Melbourne withdrew the
scheme altogether. Thus a question of third-rate importance, having been
the chronic difficulty of four Irish secretaries, was left to stand over
for three years longer, and ultimately to be settled on the very basis
which Stanley and Peel had accepted from the first. A greater waste of
parliamentary time has perhaps never been recorded.

[Pageheading: _MUNICIPAL CORPORATIONS BILL._]

The session of 1835, however, was rendered memorable by the enactment of
one beneficent measure of the first magnitude. This measure--the
municipal corporations act--was preceded, like the new poor law, by a
thorough and exhaustive inquiry. A committee of the house of commons,
followed by a commission, had been appointed in 1833. The commission
prosecuted careful researches into the local conditions of each
municipality, and did not conclude its labours until 1835. Its report
laid bare not merely grotesque anomalies, but the grossest abuses of
election and administration in boroughs ruled by small, corrupt, and
irresponsible oligarchies which then abounded in England, and, still
more, in Scotland.[132] The reform act had paved the way for the
purification of such urban communities, by disfranchising the smallest
and most venal of them, by extending the boundaries of many others, by
enfranchising great towns which had remained outside the pale of
representation, and by conferring the suffrage, theretofore monopolised
by freemen and other privileged classes, on the unprivileged mass of
ten-pound householders.

The municipal corporations bill, in its ultimate form, rested on the
same broad lines of policy. It imposed upon all boroughs, with the
exception of the city of London and a few of minor importance, one
constitutional form of government, identical in all its essential
features with those which a few model boroughs already possessed. The
governing body was to consist of a mayor, aldermen, and cou