But those very men were now binding themselves by a declaration that, unless the Bill passed, they would pay no taxes, nor purchase property distrained by the tax-gatherer.  In thus renouncing the first obligation of a citizen they did in effect draw the sword, and they would have been cravens if they had left it in the scabbard.  Lord Milton did something to enhance the claim of his historic house upon the national gratitude by giving practical effect to this audacious resolve; and, after the lapse of two centuries, another Great Rebellion, more effectual than its predecessor, but so brief and bloodless that history does not recognise it as a rebellion at all, was inaugurated by the essentially English proceeding of a quiet country gentleman telling the Collector to call again.  The crisis lasted just a week.  The Duke had no mind for a succession of Peterloos, on a vaster scale, and with a different issue.  He advised the King to recall his Ministers; and his Majesty, in his turn, honoured the refractory lords with a most significant circular letter, respectful in form, but unmistakable in tenor.  A hundred peers of the Opposition took the hint, and contrived to be absent whenever Reform was before the House.  The Bill was read for a third time by a majority of five to one on the 4th of June; a strange, and not very complimentary, method of celebrating old George the Third’s birthday.  On the 5th it received the last touches in the Commons; and on the 7th it became an Act, in very much the same shape, after such and so many vicissitudes, as it wore when Lord John Russell first presented it to Parliament.

Macaulay, whose eloquence had signalised every stage of the conflict, and whose printed speeches are, of all its authentic records, the most familiar to readers of our own day, was not left without his reward.  He was appointed one of the Commissioners of the Board of Control, which, for three quarters of a century from 1784 onwards, represented the Crown in its relations to the East Indian directors.  His duties, like those of every individual member of a Commission, were light or heavy as he chose to make them; but his own feeling with regard to those duties must not be deduced from the playful allusions contained in letters dashed off, during the momentary leisure of an over-busy day, for the amusement of two girls who barely numbered forty years between them.  His speeches and essays teem with expressions of a far deeper than official interest in India and her people; and his minutes remain on record, to prove that he did not affect the sentiment for a literary or oratorical purpose.  The attitude of his own mind with regard to our Eastern empire is depicted in the passage on Burke, in the essay on Warren Hastings, which commences with the words, “His knowledge of India—­,” and concludes with the sentence, “Oppression in Bengal was to him the same thing as oppression in the streets of London.”  That passage, unsurpassed as it is in force of language, and splendid fidelity of detail, by anything that Macaulay ever wrote or uttered, was inspired, as all who knew him could testify, by sincere and entire sympathy with that great statesman of whose humanity and breadth of view it is the merited, and not inadequate, panegyric.