As
Prime-minister, he inserted in the speech with which the new sovereign
opened his first Parliament in the autumn after his accession a general
panegyric on that "happy form of government under which, through the
favor of Divine Providence, this country had enjoyed for a long
succession of years a greater share of internal peace, of commercial
prosperity, of true liberty, of all that constitutes social happiness,
than had fallen to the lot of any other country of the world." And in
his own character, a few nights afterward, he added a practical
commentary on those sentences of the royal speech, when, in allusion to
Lord Grey's expression of a hope that the ministers would prepare "to
redress the grievances of the people by a reform of the Parliament," he
repudiated the suggestion altogether, avowing that the government were
contemplating no such measure, and adding that "he would go farther, and
say that he had never read or heard of any measure up to that moment
which in any degree satisfied his mind that the state of the
representation could be improved or rendered more satisfactory to the
country at large than at that moment. He was fully convinced that the
country possessed at that moment a Legislature which answered all good
purposes of legislation to a greater degree than any Legislature had
ever answered them in any country whatever.
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