whose own
hands are full of public work at a time when his opponent has nothing to
do except to make himself disagreeable. But, having once undertaken
to fight the battle of the Leeds Liberals, he fought it stoutly and
cheerily; and he would have been the last to claim it as a merit, that,
with numerous opportunities of a safe and easy election at his disposal,
he remained faithful to the supporters who had been so forward to honour
him with their choice.

The old system died hard; but in May 1832 came its final agony. The
Reform Bill had passed the Commons, and had been read a second time in
the Upper House; but the facilities which Committee affords for maiming
and delaying a measure of great magnitude and intricacy proved too much
for the self-control of the Lords. The King could not bring himself
to adopt that wonderful expedient by which the unanimity of the three
branches of our legislature may, in the last resort, be secured.
Deceived by an utterly fallacious analogy, his Majesty began to be
persuaded that the path of concession would lead him whither it had led
Louis the Sixteenth; and he resolved to halt on that path at the point
where his Ministers advised him to force the hands of their lordships
by creating peers. The supposed warnings of the French Revolution, which
had been dinned into the ears of the country by every Tory orator
from Peel to Sibthorpe, at last had produced their effect on the royal
imagination. Earl Grey resigned, and the Duke of Wellington, with a
loyalty which certainly did not stand in need of such an unlucky proof,
came forward to meet the storm. But its violence was too much even for
his courage and constancy. He could not get colleagues to assist him in
the Cabinet, or supporters to vote with him in Parliament, or soldiers
to fight for him in the streets; and it was evident that in a few days
his position would be such as could only be kept by fighting.

The revolution had in truth commenced. At a meeting of the political
unions on the slope of Newhall Hill at Birmingham a hundred thousand
voices had sung the words:

God is our guide. No swords we draw.
We kindle not war's battle fires.
By union, justice, reason, law,
We claim the birthright of our sires.

But those very men were now binding themselves by a declaration that,
unless the Bill passed, they would pay no taxes, nor purchase property
distrained by the tax-gatherer. In thus renouncing the first obligation
of a c