passed a bill to which it is known that we have strong objections, that bill is to be tacked to a bill of supply.  If we alter it, we are told that we are attacking the most sacred privilege of the representatives of the people, and that we must either take the whole or reject the whole.  If we reject the whole, public credit is shaken; the Royal Exchange is in confusion; the Bank stops payment; the army is disbanded; the fleet is in mutiny; the island is left, without one regiment, without one frigate, at the mercy of every enemy.  The danger of throwing out a bill of supply is doubtless great.  Yet it may on the whole be better that we should face that danger, once for all, than that we should consent to be, what we are fast becoming, a body of no more importance than the Convocation.

Animated by such feelings as these, a party in the Upper House was eager to take the earliest opportunity of making a stand.  On the fourth of April, the second reading was moved.  Near a hundred lords were present.  Somers, whose serene wisdom and persuasive eloquence had seldom been more needed, was confined to his room by illness; and his place on the woolsack was supplied by the Earl of Bridgewater.  Several orators, both Whig and Tory, objected to proceeding farther.  But the chiefs of both parties thought it better to try the almost hopeless experiment of committing the bill and sending it back amended to the Commons.  The second reading was carried by seventy votes to twenty-three.  It was remarked that both Portland and Albemarle voted in the majority.

In the Committee and on the third reading several amendments were proposed and carried.  Wharton, the boldest and most active of the Whig peers, and the Lord Privy Seal Lonsdale, one of the most moderate and reasonable of the Tories, took the lead, and were strenuously supported by the Lord President Pembroke, and by the Archbishop of Canterbury, who seems on this occasion to have a little forgotten his habitual sobriety and caution.  Two natural sons of Charles the Second, Richmond and Southampton, who had strong personal reasons for disliking resumption bills, were zealous on the same side.  No peer, however, as far as can now be discovered, ventured to defend the way in which William had disposed of his Irish domains.  The provisions which annulled the grants of those domains were left untouched.  But the words of which the effect was to vest in the parliamentary trustees property which had never been forfeited to the King, and had never been given away by him, were altered; and the clauses by which estates and sums of money were, in defiance of constitutional principle and of immemorial practice, bestowed on persons who were favourites of the Commons, were so far modified as to be, in form, somewhat less exceptionable.  The bill, improved by these changes, was sent down by two judges to the Lower House.