his ministers was undoubted and inalienable, yet the Houses had a clear right to sit in judgment on any particular exercise of it; and that the circumstances of the late ministry having been but recently formed, of its possessing in a conspicuous degree the confidence of the great majority of the House of Commons, and of its being occupied at the moment of its dismissal with matters of high national concern, justified the House in calling on the new ministers to show valid reasons for its sudden dismissal.  As to the dissolution, it was asked what misdemeanor the late House of Commons had committed?  No difference had occurred between it and the other House of Parliament.  It had passed no hostile vote against any administration.  It had been in existence but a very short time.  All these circumstances, they affirmed, made it reasonable for the Houses to express to his Majesty their disapprobation of the dissolution.  Lord Morpeth argued, moreover, that the right of the House of Commons to inquire into such an exercise of the royal prerogative was proved by the example of Mr. Pitt, who, in 1784, had introduced into the speech from the throne a paragraph inviting Parliament to approve of the recent dissolution; and what Parliament could be asked to approve of, it manifestly had an equal right to censure.  But the most vehement of the censures of the Opposition were directed against what Lord Morpeth called “the most unseemly huddling of offices in the single person of the Duke of Wellington; an unconstitutional concentration of responsibility and power, at which there was hardly an old Whig of the Rockingham school whose hair did not stand on end.”  He admitted that in the present instance the arrangement had only been provisional and temporary, and that “no harm had been done;” but, he asked, “what harm might not have been done?  If the country had been suddenly obliged to go to war, who would have been responsible for the Foreign Department?  If an insurrection of the negroes had occurred, who was responsible for the Colonial Office?  If in Ireland any tithe dispute had arisen, who was responsible as Home-secretary?” And Lord Melbourne, though a speaker generally remarkable for moderation, on this subject went much farther; and, after urging that, “if one person held the situation of First Lord of the Treasury, and also that of Secretary of State for the Home Department, it would not only place in his hands without any control the appointment to every great office in the state, but a person so situated would also have the pecuniary resources of the state at his disposal without check or investigation,” he proceeded to assert that “an intention to exercise those offices would amount to a treasonable misdemeanor.”  He did not, indeed, go so far as his late Attorney-general, Sir J. Campbell, who, in vexation at his loss of office, had even threatened the Duke with impeachment; but, though he admitted that the Duke had been free from the guilty intention of exercising the authority of these offices, he suggested that “the Lords ought to pass some resolution calculated to prevent so great a breach of the constitution from being drawn into a precedent.”