Moreover, the assignment of many of the
charges to the Civil List even gave a false character to the
appointments themselves. If a sovereign was to pay ambassadors and
judges out of what seemed to be his private income, the logical
conclusion could hardly be avoided that he had a right to lower those
salaries, or even to diminish the number of those appointments. And it
may even be said that the less any real danger of such a right being so
exercised was to be apprehended, the more unadvisable was it to retain
an arrangement which in theory could be described as liable to such an
abuse.
Notes:
[Footnote 216: But it may be remarked that till very recently the people
out-of-doors had ceased to show any great anxiety about Reform. Two or
three years before, Lord Althorp, who, in Lord Grey's ministry, was
Chancellor of the Exchequer and leader of the House of Commons, told
Peel that the people had become so indifferent to it, that he never
meant to bring forward the question again, and in the last seven years
only fourteen petitions had been presented to Parliament in favor of it.
In reality, such a feeling in the people would have been eminently
favorable to a calm framing of a Moderate measure; but this indifference
was soon changed into a more violent and widely diffused excitement than
there was any record of since the days of the Popish Plot; that
excitement, however, according to the confession of the historian of the
Whig ministry and the Reform Bill, himself an ardent reformer, being "no
spontaneous result of popular feeling, but being brought about by the
incessant labors of a few shrewd and industrious partisans forming a
secret, but very active and efficient, committee in London.
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