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 the ministerial proposals made. At heart he was no friend to extreme reform; he vigorously supported the bill in debate, answering Peel, for example, on 4 March 1831 very effectively; but when attempts at compromise were made, after the House of Lords had rejected the bill in October, and riots had occurred in various parts of the country, he was among the most active in promoting an agreement. With Lord Grey's approval, he visited Lord Sandon [see, second ], to discuss terms of compromise, and was regarded as the leader of the moderate reformers in the cabinet. Thus, on the one hand, he delivered a brilliant and crushing speech in reply to Croker during the second reading debate of the third bill on 17 Dec. 1831 (, 3rd ser. ix. 521), and, on the other, was pressing Lord Grey for concessions with regard to duplicate voting and to the number of the proposed metropolitan constituencies. By May 1832 these concessions had almost been obtained, when the ministry was compelled to resign by the lords' acceptance of Lyndhurst's motion to postpone consideration of the disfranchising clauses to that of the enfranchising clauses. The failure of negotiations so nearly completed was keenly resented by Stanley, and in an after-supper speech at Brooke's he used language of extreme bitterness towards the Duke of Wellington. From this time he vigorously supported the full reform scheme, and no doubt the success of the bill was materially aided by his speeches. On 19 Jan. 1832 he also introduced the ministerial Reform Bill for Ireland; but it excited little interest, though he proposed an increase in the number of Irish members. He succeeded his father as member for North Lancashire on 17 Dec. 1832, and held the seat till he was raised to the peerage.

During the debates and dissolutions on reform, Stanley had been incessantly occupied not only with the fortunes of the bill, but with the administrative duties of his office. He had to ‘adjust the state of Ireland to that first retreat from the Ascendency position which was involved in the granting of catholic emancipation.’ He instituted the Irish board of works and the Shannon navigation improvements. In 1831 he brought in the Irish Education Act, which was remarkable for the creation of the Irish board of national education and for the compromise by which, while children of all denominations were to be admitted to the schools receiving the government grant, the education given was not to be wholly secular, but was to include religious teaching of an undogmatic and neutral character. The bill was favoured by the Roman catholic priesthood, and was probably as successful as any measure on such a subject could be in Ireland. In December of the same year he was chairman of a committee on Irish tithes, and in the following spring, in spite of the most determined and violent opposition from the Irish Roman catholic members, he passed a temporary palliative act, followed in July by the first of three bills to apply a more permanent remedy by making tithe composition compulsory. The act, with the addition of Littleton's Tithe Act in the following year, continued in force till 1838. During these debates Stanley's relations with O'Connell and his followers had become gravely embittered. Matters became worse in November, after he had declared in the strongest terms in an election speech in North Lancashire that he would resist repeal to the death. His measures in 1833 were a very strong Peace Preservation Act and an Irish Church Temporalities Act, and his first battle on the former was in the cabinet. Althorp wished to resign rather than be responsible for such a proposal. Stanley insisted; and as it was apparent that the resignation of either must break up the ministry, Lord Althorp gave way. The conduct of the bill was placed in Althorp's hands, but he introduced it in a speech so half-hearted that many of the ministerialists wavered, and a defeat became dangerously probable. Stanley took the papers, shut himself up for a couple of hours, mastered the complicated facts and figures, and, returning, made a speech so convincing, so uncompromising, and so hostile to the Irish party that he silenced O'Connell, and, thanks to his sole exertions, passed the bill by huge majorities (for the description of this incident see, Recollections, pp. 112, 113; , Life of Lord Althorp, p. 455). The Church Temporalities Bill also, though introduced by Althorp, was Stanley's bill.

Having achieved so much Irish legislation during a comparatively short tenure of the chief secretaryship and shown himself a masterful and drastic administrator, he was on 28 March transferred to the colonial office. Greville states (Memoirs, 1st ser. ii. 366) that a positive promise of a secretaryship of state had been made him in 1832, and that it was only on his threats of resignation and the strongest pressure on Goderich that room was made for him in the latter's place. In his new office he attacked the question of the abolition of slavery, at first by resolutions (, Parl. Deb. 3rd ser.