“This,” he said, “is the greatest measure which has ever been before Parliament in my time, and the most pregnant with good or evil to the country; and, though I seldom meddle with political meetings, I could not reconcile it to my conscience to be absent from this.  Every year for this half century the question of Reform has been pressing upon us, till it has swelled up at last into this great and awful combination; so that almost every City and every Borough in England are at this moment assembled for the same purpose and are doing the same thing we are doing.”

A great part of the controversy turned on the disfranchisement of the “Pocket Boroughs,” and this was a subject which immediately suggested a happy apologue—­

“These very same politicians are now looking in an agony of terror at the disfranchisement of Corporations containing twenty or thirty persons, sold to their representatives, who are themselves perhaps sold to the Government:  and to put an end to these enormous abuses is called Corporation robbery, and there are some persons wild enough to talk of compensation.  This principle of compensation you will consider perhaps, in the following instance, to have been carried as far as sound discretion permits.  When I was a young man, the place in England I remember as most notorious for highwaymen and their exploits was Finchley Common, near the metropolis; but Finchley Common, in the progress of improvement, came to be enclosed, and the highwaymen lost by these means the opportunity of exercising their gallant vocation.  I remember a friend of mine proposed to draw up for them a petition to the House of Commons for compensation, which ran in this manner—­’We, your loyal highwaymen of Finchley Common and its neighbourhood having, at great expense, laid in a stock of blunderbusses, pistols, and other instruments for plundering the public, and finding ourselves impeded in the exercise of our calling by the said enclosure of the said Common of Finchley, humbly petition your Honourable House will be pleased to assign to us such compensation as your Honourable House in its wisdom and justice may think fit.’—­Gentlemen, I must leave the application to you....

“The greater part of human improvements, I am sorry to say, are made after war, tumult, bloodshed, and civil commotion:  mankind seem to object to every species of gratuitous happiness, and to consider every advantage as too cheap, which is not purchased by some calamity.  I shall esteem it as a singular act of God’s providence, if this great nation, guided by these warnings of history, not waiting till tumult for Reform, nor trusting Reform to the rude hands of the lowest of the people, shall amend their decayed institutions at a period when they are ruled by a popular monarch, guided by an upright minister, and blessed with profound peace.”

On the 22nd of March the Second Reading was carried