it must be at least equally so to use his name to defeat them.  And the case is infinitely stronger, if the measure to be defeated be one which has been introduced by his ministers.  For there can be no doubt whatever that, so long as they are his ministers, they are entitled to his full and complete support on every question; alike in their general policy and on each separate measure.  When he can no longer give them that support, which the very act of conferring their offices on them promised them, his only legitimate and becoming course is to dismiss them from their offices, and to abide the judgment of Parliament and the nation on that act.  Thus William IV. acted in the autumn of 1834; and thus George III. himself acted at the end of the month of which we are speaking.  But to retain them in their offices, and to employ an unofficial declaration of his dissent from them to defeat their policy, is neither consistent with the straightforward conduct due from one gentleman to another, nor with the principle on which the system of administration, such as prevails in this country, is founded.

As has been already mentioned, the King at once dismissed the Coalition Ministry.  Mr. Pitt accepted the conduct of affairs, and by so doing accepted the responsibility for all the acts of the King which had conduced to his appointment.  Lord John Russell, who in his “Memorials and Correspondence of Fox” has related and examined the whole transaction at considerable though not superfluous length, while blaming the prudence, and in some points the propriety, of Fox’s conduct, at the same time severely censures Pitt as “committing a great fault in accepting office as the price of an unworthy intrigue,” and affirms that “he and his colleagues who accepted office upon the success of this intrigue placed themselves in an unconstitutional position."[92] This seems to be a charge which can hardly be borne out.  In dismissing his former ministry, the King was clearly acting within his right; and, if so, Pitt was equally within his in undertaking the government.  The truer doctrine would seem to be, that, in so undertaking it, he assumed the entire responsibility for the dismissal of his predecessors,[93] and left it to the people at large, by the votes of their representatives, to decide whether that dismissal were justified, and whether, as its inevitable consequence, his acceptance of office were also justified or not.  The entire series of transactions, from the meeting of Parliament in November, 1783, to its dissolution in the following March, may be constitutionally regarded as an appeal by the King from the existing House of Commons to the entire nation, as represented by the constituencies; and their verdict, as is well known, ratified in the most emphatic manner all that had been done.  And we may assert this without implying that, if the single act of empowering Lord Temple to influence the peers by the declaration of the King’s private feeling had been submitted by itself to the electors, they