enforced by Fox, Whitbread, and others;
and opposed by Pitt, Jenkinson, and Powys. Pitt explained his former
motives for being friendly to a parliamentary reform, and his objections
against it at the present moment. Many petitions had been presented in
favour of reform; and Pitt said, that if the principle of individual
suffrage, pointed at in some of these petitions, was to be carried out,
the peerage would be extinguished, the king deposed, every hereditary
distinction and every privileged order swept away, and there would be
established that system of equalizing anarchy announced in the code of
French legislation, and attested in the blood of the massacres at Paris.
Fox attacked Pitt on the score of inconsistency. He observed, that as
Lord Foppington said in the play, "I begin to think that when I was a
commoner, I was a very nauseous fellow; so Pitt began to think, that
when he was a reformer, he must have been a very foolish fellow." Fox
called the objection to the time for reform a fallacy; a mere pretext
for putting off what the house knew was necessary, but felt unwilling
to grant. The debate lasted two days; when the motion for referring the
petitions to a committee were negatived by two hundred and eighty two,
against forty-one.

{GEORGE III. 1793-1794}

PROROGATION OF PARLIAMENT.

The king prorogued parliament on the 21st of June. In his speech his
majesty noticed the rapid and signal successes which, in an early period
of the campaign, had attended the operations of the combined armies; the
respectable force which he had been enabled to employ by sea and land,
and the measures which he had concerted with the other powers for the
effectual prosecution of the war. From all this his majesty augured a
happy issue to the important contest in which we were engaged.

AFFAIRS OF IRELAND.

During this year an important concession was made to the Roman Catholics
of Ireland. Many events led to this measure. On the failure of Pitt's
attempt, in 1785, to reconcile the commercial interests of the two
countries, resolutions were made in Ireland to abstain from the
importation of English manufactures, and efforts were made by the
populace to enforce these resolutions on all who disapproved of them.
The tumults and alarms which followed these proceedings, gave rise, in
the session of 1786, for an act, establishing a police in the city of
Dublin, which, as the inhabitants were taxed for the support of the
of