The full advantages of this reform could not be seen at first; but, even had it been appreciated as fully as we appreciate it now, no approval of it could have counterbalanced the general dissatisfaction with which the ministry was regarded.  At home the finances were falling into great disorder, the expenditure of the year greatly exceeding the income; while the feeling that their Irish policy was dictated by a wish to purchase at any price the support of O’Connell, was still more injurious to them, for he was already beginning to renew agitation in Ireland, inaugurating a new association, which, though its purposes were faintly veiled for a time under the title of the Precursor Association, was understood to point at a repeal of the Union; while the ministers, though they denounced such a measure as ruinous to every part of the kingdom, seemed willing to give it practical encouragement by a bill which they introduced, which bore the name of a Registration Act for Ireland, but which was not confined to that object.  On the contrary, it contained a provision for lowering the qualification for the franchise by one-half; so that it was, in fact, a new Reform Bill for Ireland,[252] calculated greatly to increase his influence by the number of voters of the poorer classes whom it would create.  The bill was defeated, but the odium of having proposed it remained.

But, besides these home difficulties, there were troubles abroad, both in the East and in the West.  In the East, the complications inseparable from a dominion like that of ours in India, where constant expansion seemed to have become a law of its existence, had involved us in a war with a new enemy, the warlike Afghan nation; in the West, both Jamaica and Canada were in a state threatening insurrection.  Indeed, the troubles in Jamaica had been the immediate cause of that resignation of the ministry in 1839 which has already been mentioned.  Measures adopted in the English Parliament with reference to the termination of that apprenticeship system which, as we have seen, formed a part of the bill for the abolition of slavery, and another for the regulation of the prisons in the island, had given such offence to the colonial Assembly, never very manageable, that the members passed a resolution that their legislative rights had been violated, and that they would abstain from all exercise of their legislative functions, except such as might be necessary “to preserve inviolate the faith of the island with the public creditor, until” (by the rescinding of the resolutions, etc., of which they complained) “they should be left to the free exercise of their inherent rights as British subjects.”  And this resolution was seconded by an insulting protest, in which they drew an offensive comparison between the state of crime in the island and that which prevailed in Great Britain, taunting the British Parliament with the murders and acts of incendiarism which terrified Ireland night