for them. THE PASSING OF THE ELECTION REFORM BILL Chapter CXVI PARLIAMENTARY REFORM. HE royal blackguard, George IV., was fifty-seven years old when he came to the throne. While Prince of Wales his income had been more than half a million dollars; but he was always swamped by debt and cared mainly for debaucheries and shameless pleasures. By 1795 his debts had become so mountainous that Parliament undertook to wipe them out by an appropriation of $3,000,000. Ere long he was as deeply involved as before, and had not help been given him again by the meek tax-payers, he would have been hopelessly bankrupt. When he became King, matters grew worse than before. The nation paid more than a million dollars for his coronation. The jewels in which he appeared were borrowed, and he stole them, for his neglect to return them amounted to nothing less than that, and Parliament, as meek as ever, paid Added to his incredible extravagance, this moral pervert did all he could to oppose reforms, simply because they were reforms. When he was made Regent in 1811, he wanted to form a Whig ministry, knowing that that was contrary to his father's wishes. Convinced that it could not be done, he accepted Tory rule, and formed an administration whose chief aim was to prevent the Catholics from having representation in Parliament. What a commentary on the idiocy of the English method of government that, while this loathsome pauper was spending thousands of dollars every day on his vices, there were tens of thousands of poor people whose shoes he was not worthy to unloose, suffering the pangs of starvation! When the people assembled to discuss their grievances, they were dispersed by troops. So many were killed and wounded at Manchester, where the soldiers fired into the assemblage, that it was afterward referred to as the “Manchester Massacre." A man named Thistlewood and several desperate characters met in a stable in Cato Street, London, and formed a plot to murder the whole Cabinet while at dinner. The scheme was discovered, and the leader and four of his comrades were hanged. The marriage of the Prince of Wales with his cousin, Caroline, was entered into by him on the demand of his father, because it offered a prospect of his debts being paid. She was a coarse woman, from whom the Prince soon separated. Shortly after he became King, a bill was brought into Parliament to divorce her for criminal misconduct. The examination of witnesses before the House of Lords disclosed such baseness in the King that the bill was dropped. His wife had the sympathy of the people, but the King was resolute that she should not be crowned as his consort. She appeared on the morning of the coronation before the doors of Westminster Abbey only to be turned away. She died shortly after. Three reforms were carried through during the reign of George IV. The first was the repeal of the Corporation Act, which had excluded Dissenters from all town or corporate offices; the second was the repeal of the Test Act, passed under Charles II., to keep Catholics and Dissenters out of government offices, whether civil or military. The third and most important reform was the passage in 1829 of the Catholic Emancipation Act. This was bitterly opposed by the Duke of Wellington, who was Prime Minister, and by the King; but it went through in spite of them. It gave the Catholics the right to sit in Parliament, a privilege which had been denied them for more than a century. Daniel O'Connell, an honorable Irish gentleman, possessing great ability, became the leader of the Catholics. He succeeded after much difficulty in securing his seat in the House of Commons, and then devoted his energies to bringing about the repeal of the Act uniting Ireland with England and the restoration of the Irish Parliament. In this, however, he was doomed to failure. A decisive change was brought about in the commercial policy. It had been the sentiment that trade should be controlled by law with a view of forcing it into those channels most advantageous to the nation or to particular classes. Thus heavy duties were laid on raw silk, while the importation of foreign-wrought silks was forbidden, the belief being that the home manufacture would thus be helped. There was violent opposition between the sheep owners, who wished to keep out foreign wool and to export their own, and the manufacturers, who wished free import and the prohibition of exports, so that the manufacture would be kept in their own hands. But the belief that a per |