obnoxious article concerning the loyalists, but all to no purpose.
Hartley's attempt to negotiate a mutually advantageous commercial treaty
with America also came to nothing. The definitive treaty which was
finally signed on the 3d of September, 1783, was an exact transcript of
the treaty which Shelburne had made, and for making which the present
ministers had succeeded in turning him out of office. No more emphatic
justification of Shelburne's conduct of this business could possibly
have been obtained.

The coalition ministry did not long survive the final signing of the
treaty. The events of the next few months are curiously instructive as
showing the quiet and stealthy way in which a political revolution may
be consummated in a thoroughly conservative and constitutional country.
Early in the winter session of Parliament Fox brought in his famous bill
for organizing the government of the great empire which Clive and
Hastings had built up in India. Popular indignation at the ministry had
been strengthened by its adopting the same treaty of peace for the
making of which it had assaulted Shelburne; and now, on the passage of
the India Bill by the House of Commons, there was a great outcry. Many
provisions of the bill were exceedingly unpopular, and its chief object
was alleged to be the concentration of the immense patronage of India
into the hands of the old Whig families. With the popular feeling thus
warmly enlisted against the ministry, George III. was now emboldened to
make war on it by violent means; and, accordingly, when the bill came up
in the House of Lords, he caused it to be announced, by Lord Temple,
that any peer who should vote in its favour would be regarded as an
enemy by the king. Four days later the House of Commons, by a vote of
153 to 80, resolved that "to report any opinion, or pretended opinion,
of his majesty upon any bill or other proceeding depending in either
house of Parliament, with a view to influence the votes of the members,
is a high crime and misdemeanour, derogatory to the honour of the crown,
a breach of the fundamental privileges of Parliament, and subversive of
the constitution of this country." A more explicit or emphatic defiance
to the king would have been hard to frame. Two days afterward the Lords
rejected the India Bill, and on the next day, the 18th of December,
George turned the ministers out of office.

[Sidenote: Constitutional crisis, ending in the overwhelming victory of