quarter was to be given in election petitions;" and it was a division on one petition which eventually drove him from office. There was not even a pretence made of deciding according to evidence, for few of the members took the trouble to hear it. A few years after the time of which we are speaking, Lord George Germaine thus described the mode of proceeding which had previously prevailed: "The managers of petitions did not ask those on whose support they calculated to attend at the examination of witnesses, but only to let them know where they might be found when the question was going to be put, that they might be able to send them word in time for the division." The practice had become a public scandal, by which the constituencies and the House itself suffered equally—the constituencies, inasmuch as they were liable to be represented by one who was in fact only the representative of a minority; the House itself, since its title to public confidence could have no solid or just foundation but such as was derived from its members being in every instance the choice of the majority. Yet, so long as petitions were judged by the whole House, there seemed no chance of the abuse being removed, the number of judges conferring the immunity of shamelessness on each individual. To remedy such a state of things, in the spring of 1770 Mr. G. Grenville brought in a bill which provided for the future trial of all such petitions by a select committee of fifteen members, thirteen of whom should be chosen by ballot, one by the sitting member whose seat was petitioned against, and one by the petitioner. The members of the committee were to take an oath to do justice similar to that taken by jurymen in the courts of law; and the committee was to have power to compel the attendance of witnesses, to examine them on oath, and to enforce the production of all necessary papers; it was also to commence its sittings within twenty-four hours of its appointment, and to sit from day to day till it should be prepared to present its report. It was not to the credit of the ministers that they made the passing of such a bill a party question. The abuse which it was designed to remedy was notorious, and Mr. Grenville did not exaggerate its magnitude when he declared that, "if it were not checked, it must end in the ruin of public liberty." He was supported by Burke, and by two lawyers, Mr. Dunning and Mr. Wedderburn, both destined to rise to some of the highest offices in their profession; but he was opposed by the Attorney-general, by Lord North, as leader of the House, and by Mr. Fox—not yet turned into a patriot by Lord North's dismissal of him from office. The debates, both in the whole House and in committee, were long and earnest. Some of the ministerial underlings were not ashamed to deny the necessity of any alteration in the existing practice; but their more favorite argument was founded on the impropriety of the House "delegating its authority to a committee," which was asserted to be "an essential alteration of the constitution of the House of Commons." Lord North himself had too keen an instinct of propriety to deny the existence of a great evil, and contented himself with pleading for time for farther consideration; while the Attorney-general confined his objections to some details of the bill, which it would be easy to amend. Others, with too accurate a foresight, doubted the efficacy of the measure, and prophesied that the additional sanction of the oath, by which its framer hoped to bind the committees to a just and honest decision, would, "like oaths of office and Custom-house oaths, soon fall into matters of form, and lose all sanction, and so make bad worse." On the other hand, besides the arguments founded on the admitted greatness of the evil to be remedied, it was shown that the institution of committees, such as the bill proposed the appointment of, was sanctioned by numerous precedents; and though the committees—sometimes consisting of as many as two hundred members—were by far too large to make it probable that all would bestow a careful attention on the whole case, there was "nothing in the journals of the House to show that their decisions were not regarded as final, or as requiring no subsequent confirmation from the whole House." Generally speaking, Lord North could trust the steadiness of his majority; but, to his great surprise, on this occasion he found himself deserted by the country gentlemen, who voted in a body for the bill, although their spokesman, Sir W. Bagot, had been in no slight degree offended by some remarks of Burke, who, with a strange imprudence, had claimed a monopoly of the title of "friends of the constitution" for himself and his party, and had sneered at the country gentlemen, as "statesmen of a very different description, though, by a late description given of them, a Tory was now the best species of Whig." And the union of the two bodies proved irresistible; the bill was carried by a majority of sixty-two, and the government did not venture to carry on their resistance to it in the House of Lords, any interference by which would, indeed, have been resented by the Commons, as a violation of their privileges.