In 1826 he was called to the bar, but he was becoming more and more interested in public affairs and longed to be in Parliament. In 1830 Lord Lansdowne, who had been much impressed by Macaulay's articles on Mill, and by his high moral and private character, gave him the opportunity to represent Calne--"on the eve of the most momentous conflict," says Trevelyan, "that ever was fought out by speech and vote within the walls of a senate-house."[6] When the Reform Bill was introduced, the opposition laughed contemptuously at the impossibility of disfranchising, wholly or in part, a hundred and ten boroughs for the sake of securing a fair representation of the United Kingdom in the House of Commons. Two days later Macaulay made the first of his Reform speeches, and "when he sat down, the Speaker sent for him, and told him that, in all his prolonged experience, he had never seen the House in such a state of excitement." That not only unsettled the House of Commons but put an end to the question whether he should give his time to law or to politics. During the next three years he devoted himself to Parliament. Entering with his whole soul into the thickest of the fight for reform, he made a speech on the second reading of the Reform Bill which no less a critic than Jeffrey said put him "clearly at the head of the great speakers, if not the debaters, of the House."[7] Naturally the social advantages of the position appealed to Macaulay. He appreciated the freedom, the good fellowship, the spirit of equality among the members. "For the space of three seasons he dined out almost nightly"; and for a man who at a time when his parliamentary fame was highest, was so reduced that he sold the gold medals he had won at Cambridge,--though "he was never for a moment in debt,"--it was sometimes convenient to be a lion. Yet this "sitting up in the House of Commons till three o'clock five days in the week, and getting an indigestion at great dinners the remaining two," would not have been the first choice of a man whose greatest joy "in the midst of all this praise" was to think of the pleasure which his success would give to his father and his sisters. In June, 1832, the bill which Macaulay had supported so zealously and so eloquently at every stage of the fight, finally became an act. As a reward the great orator was appointed a commissioner of the Board of Control, which represented the crown in its relations to the East Indian directors. He held this commissionership only eighteen months, however, for as a means of reducing expenses the Whig Government suppressed it. It is to Macaulay's everlasting credit that he voted for this economic measure at a time when his Trinity fellowship was about to expire, and when the removal from office left him penniless.