disabled from ever dismissing them.  That such a revocation of ancient charters, and such an immovable establishment of an administration, were inconsistent with the principles of the constitution, was not a position taken up by Pitt in the heat of debate, but was his deliberate opinion, as may be fairly inferred from his assertion of it in a private letter[84] to his friend the Duke of Rutland.  It may, however, be doubted whether the epithet “unconstitutional” could be properly applied to the bill on either ground.  There is, indeed, a certain vagueness in the meaning, or at all events in the frequent use of this adjective.  Sometimes it is used to imply a violation of the provisions of the Great Charter, or of its later development, the Bill of Rights; sometimes to impute some imagined departure from the principles which guided the framers of those enactments.  But in neither sense does it seem applicable to this bill.  To designate the infringement or revocation of a charter by such a description would be to affirm the existence of a right in the sovereign to invest a charter, from whatever motive it may originally have been granted, with such a character of inviolability or perpetuity that no Parliament should, on ever such strong grounds of public good, have the power of interfering with it.  And to attribute such a power to the crown appears less consistent with the limitations affixed to the royal prerogative by the constitution, than to regard all trusts created by the crown as subject to parliamentary revision in the interests of the entire nation.  On the second ground the description seems even less applicable.  An arrangement of patronage is a mere matter of detail, not of principle.  For the minister to propose such an arrangement as should secure for himself and his party a perpetual monopoly of power and office might be grasping and arrogant; for Parliament (and Parliament consists of the sovereign and the peers, as well as of the House of Commons) to assent to such an arrangement might be short-sighted and impolitic; but it is not clear that either the minister in proposing such an enactment, or the Parliament in adopting it, would be violating either the letter or the spirit of the constitution.  Every member of the Governing Board was to be appointed by the Parliament itself; and, though unquestionably Fox would have the nomination, and though he could reckon on the support of the majority in the House of Commons for those whom he might select, still it was a strictly constitutional machinery that he was putting in motion.

A measure, however, may be very objectionable without being unconstitutional, and such a view of the India Bill the progress of the debates in the House of Commons disposed the King to take of it.  In the House of Peers Lord Thurlow described the bill as one to take the crown off his head and place it on that of Mr. Fox; and, even without adopting that description to its full extent, the King might easily regard the