ty-three. In the committee none of the provisions of the bill
underwent any important alteration, except the allowing of sheriff's in
the large boroughs to be chosen by the town-councils. Ministers listened
to the objections urged against this, and retained the nomination of
these officers in the power of the crown. The bill was finally passed
on the 28th of March, after another debate, by a majority of two hundred
and sixty to one hundred and ninety-nine.

A harder battle was, however, to be fought in the lords. On the second
reading Lord Lyndhurst expressed his willingness to go into committee,
but not with the intention of preserving the bill in all its present
features. He did not deny that evils existed in the Irish corporations,
but he wished to see some scheme adopted which would not only remove
those evils, but prevent the recurrence of others of a similar kind. The
present bill, however, was a bill to extend the system of exclusion, and
to aggravate all the violations to which justice was now exposed. The
town-councils would not consist of persons anxious for the preservation
of peace and the security of property, but would be filled with men
of the anti-church and Catholic party, advocates of the repeal of
the union, and of the separation of British and Irish interests.
His lordship argued that the five-pound qualification would increase
agitation, would aggrandise radical interests. If excitement, he said,
prevailed in Ireland at the election of members of parliament, how far
more prevalent would be the excitement which would attend the elections
of this bill. His lordship looked also, with alarm, at the formidable
power which the priesthood would gain by this bill; and the
town-councils, he contended, would be confined to a party of
inflammatory demagogues: justice itself would be poisoned at its source,
and corporate property devoted to anything but its legitimate purposes.
He concluded by sketching a plan similar to that which had been proposed
in the commons by Sir Robert Peel, and which he, or some of those with
whom he acted, would propose should be inserted in the bill in place
of the clauses containing the new corporations. The house went into
committee on the 26th of April, when Lord Fitzgerald moved, as had been
done in the commons, "That it be an instruction to the committee to
make provision for the abolition of such corporations, and for such
arrangements as may be necessary on their abolition for