other circumstances also.  Many of those who were commonly called the Ultra Tories had been so alienated from the Duke’s government by the Emancipation Act, that they were known to be ready to coalesce with almost any party for the sake of overturning his administration.  Moreover, as forty years before, the French Revolution of 1789 had caused great political excitement in England, so now the new French revolution of July acted as a strong stimulus on the movement party in this as well as in other countries; and altogether there was a very general feeling that the time for important changes had come.  The Duke of Wellington was not blind to the prevalence of the idea; and, being by no means willing to admit that his own policy of the preceding year had in the least contributed to strengthen it, he conceived it to be his duty to discountenance it by every means in his power; but the steps which he took with that object only invigorated and inflamed it.  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....  And he would at once declare that, as far as he was concerned, as long as he held any station in the government of the country, he should always feel it his duty to resist any measure of Reform when proposed by others.”

Such uncompromising language was, not unnaturally, regarded by the Opposition in both Houses as a direct defiance, and the challenge was promptly taken up both in and out of Parliament.  It happened that at this moment the ministry was extremely unpopular in the City; not, indeed, on account of his hostility to Reform, but in consequence of the recent introduction by the Home-secretary of a police force in London, on the model of one which the Duke himself, when Irish