names. Both were much disposed to storm against Walpole too, for the advice he had given, and for his pertinacity in forcing them on to a step which had brought nothing but humiliation. Walpole bore his position with a kind of patience which might be called either proud or stolid, according as one is pleased to look at it. With all his courage Walpole must have felt some qualms of uneasiness now and then, but if he did feel he certainly did not show them.

CHAPTER XXVI.

A PERILOUS VICTORY.

ON Tuesday, February 22, the debate took place in the House of Commons. It came on in the form of a motion for an address to the Sovereign, praying that he would make to the Prince of Wales an independent allowance of one hundred thousand a year. The motion was proposed by Pulteney himself. Lord Hervey seems to be surprised that Pulteney, after having advised the Prince not to press on any such motion, should nevertheless, when the Prince did persevere, actually propose the motion himself. But such a course is common enough even in our own days when statesmen make greater effort at political and personal consistency. A man often argues long and earnestly in the Cabinet or in the councils of the Opposition against some particular proposal, and then, when it is, in spite of his advice, made a party resolve, he goes to the House of Commons and speaks in its favour; nay, even, it may be, proposes it. Pulteney made a long and what would now be called an exhaustive speech. It was stuffed full of portentous erudition about the early history of

the eldest sons of English Kings. The speech was said to have been delivered with much less than Pulteney's usual force and fire; and indeed, so far as one can judge by the accounts-they can hardly be called reports-preserved of it, one is obliged to regard it as rather a languid and academical dissertation. We start off with what Henry the Third did for his son, afterwards Edward the First, when that noble youth had reached the unripe age of fourteen. He granted to him the Duchy of Guienne; he put him in possession of the Earldom of Chester; he made him owner of the cities and towns of Bristol, Stam-. ford, and Grantham, with several other castles and manors; he created him Prince of Wales, to which,. lest it should be merely a barren title, he annexed all the conquered lands in Wales; and he created him Governor of Ireland. All this, to be sure, was mightily liberal on the part of Henry the Third, and a very handsome and right royal way of providing for his own family; but it might be supposed an argument rather to frighten than to encourage a modern English Parliament. But the orator went on to show what glorious deeds in arms were done by this highly endowed Prince, and the inferences which he appeared to wish his audience to draw were twofold: first, that Edward would never have done these glorious deeds if his father had not given him these magnificent allowances; and next, that if an equal, or anything like an equal, liberality were shown to Frederick, Prince of Wales, it was extremely probable that he would rush into the field at

1737.

FROM THE BLACK PRINCE DOWN.

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the first opportunity and make a clean sweep of the foes of England.

in

We need not follow the orator through his account of what was done for Edward the Black Prince, and what Edward the Black Prince had done consequence; and how Henry the Fifth had been able to conquer France because of his father's early liberality. The whole argument tended to impress upon the House of Commons the maxim that in a free country, above all others, it is absolutely necessary to have the heir apparent of the Crown bred up in a state of grandeur and independence. Despite the high-flown sentiments and the grandiose historical illustrations in which the speaker indulged, there seems to the modern intelligence an inherent meanness, a savour of downright vulgarity, through the whole of it. If you give a prince only fifty thousand a year, you cannot expect anything of him. What can he know of grandeur of soul, of national honour, of constitutional rights, of political liberty? You cannot get these qualities in a prince unless you pay him at least a hundred thousand a year while his father is living. The argument would have told more logically if the English Parliament were going into the open market to buy the best prince they could get. There would be some show of reason then in arguing that the more we pay the better article we shall have. But it is hard indeed to understand how a prince who is to be worth nothing if you only give him fifty thousand a year will be another Black Prince or Henry the Fifth if you let him have the spending of

fifty thousand a year more. Walpole led the cpposition to the motion. Much of the argument on both sides was essentially sordid, but there was a good deal also which was keen, close, and clever, and which may have even now a sort of constitutional interest. The friends of the Prince knew they must have to meet the contention that Parliament had no right to interfere with the sovereign's appropriation of the revenues allotted to him. They therefore contended, and, as it seems to us, with force and justice, that the Parliament which made the grants had a perfect right to see that the grants were appropriated to the uses for which they were intended, to follow out the grants in the course of their application, and even to direct that they should be applied to entirely different purposes; even, if need were, to resume them. It would naturally seem to follow from this assumption that Parliament had a right to call on the King to make the allowance to the Prince, but it would seem to follow also that the allowance ought not to be made independent and absolute. For, if the Prince of Wales had an allowance absolutely independent of the will of anyone, he had something which Pulteney and his friends were contending, as it was their business just then to contend, that the English Parliament had never consented to give to the King. On the other hand, it was pointed out with much effect that there never had been any express regulation in England to provide that the Prince of Wales should be made independent of his father, and there was clear, good sense in the contempt with which