--Margaret
Macaulay's marriage--How it affected her brother--He is
returned for Leeds--Becomes Secretary of the Board of
Control--Letters to Hannah Macaulay--Session of 1832--
Macaulay's Speech on the India Bill--His regard for Lord
Glenelg--Letters to Hannah Macaulay--The West Indian
question--Macaulay resigns Office--He gains his point, and
resumes his place--Emancipation of the Slaves--Death of
Wilberforce--Macaulay is appointed Member of the Supreme
Council of India--Letters to Hannah Macaulay, Lord
Lansdowne, and Mr. Napier--Altercation between Lord Althorp
and Mr. Shiel--Macaulay's appearance before the Committee of
Investigation--He sails for India.

DURING the earlier half of the year 1832 the vessel of Reform was still
labouring heavily; but, long before she was through the breakers, men
had begun to discount the treasures which she was bringing into port.
The time was fast approaching when the country would be called upon to
choose its first Reformed Parliament. As if the spectacle of what
was doing at Westminster did not satisfy their appetite for political
excitement, the Constituencies of the future could not refrain from
anticipating the fancied pleasures of an electoral struggle. Impatient
to exercise their privileges, and to show that they had as good an eye
for a man as those patrons of nomination seats whose discernment was
being vaunted nightly in a dozen speeches from the Opposition benches
of the House of Commons, the great cities were vying with each other to
seek representatives worthy of the occasion and of themselves. The Whigs
of Leeds, already provided with one candidate in a member of the great
local firm of the Marshalls, resolved to seek for another among the
distinguished politicians of their party. As early as October 1831
Macaulay had received a requisition from that town, and had pledged
himself to stand as soon as it had been elevated into a Parliamentary
borough. The Tories, on their side, brought forward Mr. Michael Sadler,
the very man on whose behalf the Duke of Newcastle had done "what he
liked with his own" in Newark,--and, at the last general election, had
done it in vain. Sadler, smarting from the lash of the Edinburgh Review,
infused into the contest an amount of personal bitterness that for
his own sake might better have been spared; and, during more than a
twelvemonth to come, Macaulay lived the life of a candidate