Page:History of the Radical Party in Parliament.djvu/314

 3OO History of the Radical Party in Parliament. [1837- rejection, and this time the Government majority was only ten. The Lords, of course, rejected this main feature of the measure, and ministers had to be content with the miserable remainder. But their resignation proved that they did not possess the power without which office ought to have been considered valueless. That the weakness arose not from the actual strength of the Tories, but from the disaffection of the Radicals, was shown when a vote was taken for the election of a new Speaker on the resignation of Abercromby. The election took place on the 2/th of May. Shaw Lefevre was proposed by the Liberals, and Goulburn by the Tories, and the former was carried by a majority of eighteen, the numbers being 317 to 299. What are called open questions that is, questions on which members of a Government are not agreed, and each one is allowed to take his own course are rarely heard of under a strong Administration, and never as applying to subjects of the first magnitude. The Melbourne Ministry, however, which had been destroyed by the secession of ten Radicals, could not afford to stand out on a proposal on which the whole Radical element of the party was agreed. So that when, on the 1 8th of June, Grote brought on his annual motion in favour of the ballot, Macaulay who had recently returned from India announced that this was an open question, and that he should vote for the motion. On a division the numbers were for the ballot, 217 ; against, 335. The number voting for was greater by seventeen than that of the previous year, and supposing the full party vote to have been given on the election of Speaker, it left only one hundred Whigs who were not Liberal enough to accept the ballot. Some other debates were raised on proposals for Parlia- mentary Reform. On the 2ist of March Hume was defeated by eighty-five votes to fifty on a motion to go into Committee, to introduce a bill which was for the establishment of household suffrage ; and on the 4th of June Sir H. Fleetwood moved for leave to bring in a bill to assimilate the county to the borough franchise, for which he obtained eighty-one votes, but