of the country and for the public good; yet we thought that it was a body founded upon privilege and not upon right.  It is, therefore, in the noblest and properest sense of the word, an aristocratic body, and from that characteristic the Reform Bill of 1832 did not derogate; and if at this moment we could contrive, as we did in 1859, to add considerably to the number of the constituent body, we should not change that characteristic, but it would still remain founded upon an aristocratic principle.  Well, now the Secretary of State [Sir G. Grey] has addressed us to-night in a very remarkable speech.  He also takes up the history of Reform, and before I touch upon some of the features of that speech it is my duty to refer to the statements which he made with regard to the policy which the government of Lord Derby was prepared to assume after the general election.  By a total misrepresentation of the character of the amendment proposed by Lord John Russell, which threw the government of 1858 into a minority, and by quoting a passage from a very long speech of mine in 1859, the right honorable gentleman most dexterously conveyed these two propositions to the house—­first, that Lord John Russell had proposed an amendment to our Reform Bill, by which the house declared that no bill could be satisfactory by which the working classes were not admitted to the franchise—­one of our main objects being that the working classes should in a great measure be admitted to the franchise; and, secondly, that after the election I was prepared, as the organ of the government, to give up all the schemes for those franchises founded upon personal property, partial occupation, and other grounds, and to substitute a bill lowering the borough qualification.  That conveyed to the house a totally inaccurate idea of the amendment of Lord John Russell.  There was not a single word in that amendment about the working classes.  There was not a single phrase upon which that issue was raised, nor could it have been raised, because our bill, whether it could have effected the object or not, was a bill which proposed greatly to enfranchise the working classes.  And as regards the statement I made, it simply was this.  The election was over—­we were still menaced, but we, still acting according to our sense of duty, recommended in the royal speech that the question of a reform of Parliament should be dealt with; because I must be allowed to remind the house that whatever may have been our errors, we proposed a bill which we intended to carry.  And having once taken up the question as a matter of duty, no doubt greatly influenced by what we considered the unhappy mistakes of our predecessors, and the difficult position in which they had placed Parliament and the country, we determined not to leave the question until it had been settled.  But although still menaced, we felt it to be our duty to recommend to her Majesty to introduce the question of reform when the Parliament