It will hardly be denied that the arrangement that the representative Peers of Ireland should enjoy their seats for life did make it desirable that those who were not so elected to the Upper House should be eligible as candidates for a place in the Lower House.  Otherwise, those who were not chosen as representatives of the peerage would have been placed in the anomalous and unfair position of being the only persons in the kingdom possessed of the requisite property qualification, and not disqualified by sex or profession, who were absolutely excluded from the opportunity of distinguishing themselves and serving their country in Parliament.  How great the practical benefit to the House of Commons and the country the clause he was recommending was calculated to confer, was shown in a remarkable manner the very year of his death, when an Irish Peer was returned to the House of Commons, who, retaining his seat for nearly sixty years as the representative of different constituencies, the University of Cambridge being among the number, during the course of that period rose through a variety of offices to that of Prime-minister, and, as is admitted even by those who dissented most widely from some of his opinions and actions, earned for himself an honorable reputation, as one who had rendered faithful services to the crown, and on more than one occasion had conferred substantial benefits on the country.

The arrangements proposed with respect to the Peers were not opposed.  But Mr. Grey—­generally acting as the spokesman of the Opposition on this question—­raised an objection to making so large an addition as that of one hundred new members to the British House of Commons.  He repeated his prophecy, made on a previous occasion, of the subserviency to the minister which the Irish members might be expected to exhibit, and therefore moved an amendment to reduce the number of Irish representatives to eighty-five; but, to obviate the discontent which such a reduction might be expected to excite in Ireland, he proposed to diminish the number of English members also, by disfranchising forty “of the most decayed boroughs,” a step which would leave the number of members in the new united Parliament as nearly as possible the same as it was before.  He found, however, very few to agree with him; his amendment was rejected by 176 to 34; and the minister’s proposal was adopted in all its details.

Mr. Pitt touched lightly on the next article, which limited the royal prerogative of creating Peers by a provision that the King should never confer any fresh Irish peerage till three peerages should have become extinct.  This, again, was a point of difference between the conditions of the Scotch and Irish Unions; since by the terms of the Scotch Union the King was forever debarred from creating any new Scotch peerages.  But it was pointed out that the greater antiquity of the Scotch peerages, and the circumstance that in Scotland the titles descended to collateral branches, were calculated to make the extinction of a Scotch peerage an event of very rare occurrence; while the comparative newness (with very few exceptions) of Irish peerages, and the rule by which they are “confined to immediate male descendants,” rendered the entire extinction of the Irish peerage probable, “if the power of adding to or making up the number were not given to the crown.”