satisfied the popular demand for Reform, may be regarded as certain; and equally certain that such a line of conduct would have led to a renewal of disgraceful and dangerous tumults.  The minister, therefore, as has been said before, had to choose between two evils.  It was a grievous dilemma; but those who had to deal with it (even while it may be admitted that they cannot be held wholly free from blame, as having themselves contributed by their own language to the popular excitement and irritation)[220] may be excused for thinking the wound inflicted on the constitution, by thus overbearing the voice of one House of Parliament on a single occasion, less formidable in its immediate fruit, and more capable of being remedied and retrieved, than that which would have followed from a renewal of insurrectionary tumults, even if they should have come short of actual civil war.

One critic of these transactions[221] whose experience and high reputation entitle his opinion to respectful consideration, after reminding his readers that, “although Parliament is said to be dissolved, a dissolution extends, in fact, no farther than to the Commons, and that the Peers are not affected by it; no change can take place in the constitution of their body, except as to a small number of Scotch representative peers,” proceeds to argue that, “so far as the House of Peers is concerned, a creation of peers by the crown on extraordinary occasions is the only equivalent which the constitution has provided for the change and renovation of the House of Commons by a dissolution.  In no other way can the opinions of the House of Lords be brought into harmony with those of the people.”  But it may be feared that this comparison is rather ingenious than solid.  Indeed, the writer himself limits such an expedient as a creation of peers to insure the passing of a particular measure to “extraordinary occasions.”  But a dissolution of the House of Commons is so far from being so limited, that it is the natural and inevitable end of every House of Commons after an existence which cannot exceed seven years, and which is very rarely so protracted.  And though it may be, and probably has been, the case that a House of Commons has passed measures to which it had no great inclination, lest it should provoke a minister to a premature dissolution, yet no submission on its part can long postpone it; and a threat or apprehension of a dissolution would certainly fail to overcome the opposition of the House of Commons, or of a party within it, if the measure before them seemed open to serious objection.  The presumed or presumable immortality of the one body, and the limited existence of the other, seem to constitute so essential a difference between them as must prevent the measures adopted toward one being fairly regarded as any guide to a justification of those employed in the case of the other.