perceive that so very rapid a fall must have been owing to his own incapacity.”  This is the testimony of a hostile witness.  It is borne out, however, by a circumstance of striking significance.  When the king recovered the reins at the end of 1783, not only did he send for Pitt instead of for Shelburne, but Pitt himself neither invited Shelburne to join him, nor in any way ever consulted him then or afterwards, though he had been Chancellor of the Exchequer in Shelburne’s own administration.

Whatever the causes may have been, the administration fell in the spring of 1783.  It was succeeded by the memorable ministry of the Coalition, in which Fox and Lord North divided the real power under the nominal lead of the Duke of Portland.  Members saw Lord North squeezed up on the Treasury bench between two men who had a year before been daily menacing him with the axe and the block; and it was not North whom they blamed, but Burke and Fox.  Burke had returned to the Pay-Office.  His first act there was unfortunate.  He restored to their position two clerks who had been suspended for malversation, and against whom proceedings were then pending.  When attacked for this in the House, he showed an irritation which would have carried him to gross lengths, if Fox and Sheridan had not by main force pulled him down into his seat by the tails of his coat.  The restoration of the clerks was an indefensible error of judgment, and its indiscretion was heightened by the kind of defence which Burke tried to set up.  When we wonder at Burke’s exclusion from great offices, this case of Powell and Bembridge should not be forgotten.

The decisive event in the history of the Coalition Government was the India Bill.  The Reports of the various select committees upon Indian affairs—­the most important of them all, the ninth and eleventh, having been drawn up by Burke himself—­had shown conclusively that the existing system of government was thoroughly corrupt and thoroughly inadequate.  It is ascertained pretty conclusively that the Bill for replacing that system was conceived and drawn by Burke, and that to him belongs whatever merit or demerit it might possess.  It was Burke who infected Fox with his own ardour, and then, as Moore justly says, the self-kindling power of Fox’s eloquence threw such fire into his defence of the measure, that he forgot, and his hearers never found out, that his views were not originally and spontaneously his own.  The novelty on which the great stress of discussion was laid was that the Bill withdrew power from the Board of Directors, and vested the Government for four years in a commission of seven persons named in the Bill, and not removable by the House.