which Parliament was admitted to have no right to interfere.  But the working of the whole was satisfactory to no one—­neither to the King himself, nor to those who upheld the right of the Parliament to have a predominant control of every branch of expenditure of the public money.  The feeling that the whole of the royal income and expenditure should be placed on a different footing was general, and the fall of the Duke of Wellington’s ministry had been immediately caused by the success of a proposal that, before fixing the new sovereign’s Civil List, Parliament should refer the matter to a committee, that inquiry might be made into every part of it.  Lord Grey’s ministry were bound to act in conformity with a resolution on which they had, as it were, ridden into office; and the arrangement which they ultimately effected was one in which common-sense and the royal convenience and comfort were alike consulted.  That portion of the Civil List of his predecessor which was voted by Parliament amounted to nearly L850,000 a year; but, besides that sum, George IV. enjoyed the income already mentioned as derived from Crown Lands, Droits, etc., while a farther large sum was furnished by the ancient revenue of the crown of Scotland, and another was received from Ireland.  The ministers now proposed that all these sources of income should be handed over to the Treasury, and that the Civil List should henceforward be fixed at L510,000, being at the same time relieved from all the foreign and extraneous charges on it which had invidiously swelled the gross amount, without being in any way under the control of the sovereign, or in any way ministering to his requirements, either for personal indulgence or for the maintenance of the state and magnificence imposed on him by his position.

Such a change was on every ground most desirable.  It was clearly in accordance with our parliamentary constitution that grants of money made by the Parliament should express distinctly and unmistakably the objects to which they were really to be applied; and that the charges of departments connected with the government, the administration of justice, or the foreign service of the country, should not be mixed up with others of a wholly different character, so as to make what was, in fact, the expenditure of the nation wear the appearance of being the expenditure of the sovereign.  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.