'On February 8th, 1884, it had been decided to appoint a Royal Commission on the Housing of the Working Classes, and Mr. Gladstone had expressed his wish that I should be chairman of the Commission, on which the Prince of Wales desired to serve.' 'On the 9th it was settled that Bodley, my secretary, should be secretary to the Royal Commission. I immediately wrote to Manning to ask him to serve, and he consented on February 12th.' Lord Salisbury's name lent another distinction to the list, which was completed by February 16th. [Footnote: In addition to the Prince, the Cardinal, and Lord Salisbury, Dilke's Commission consisted of Lord Brownlow, Lord Carrington, Mr. Goschen, Sir Richard Cross, the Bishop of Bedford (Dr. Walsham How), Mr. E. Lyulph Stanley, Mr. McCullagh Torrens, Mr. Broadhurst, Mr. Jesse Collings, Mr. George Godwin, and Mr. Samuel Morley. To these were added later Mr. Dwyer Gray and Sir George Harrison, for Ireland and Scotland respectively.] 'A very difficult question arose about his precedence. I referred it to the Prince of Wales, who said that he thought Manning ought to take precedence, as a Prince, after Princes of the Blood, and before Lord Salisbury.' The nice question was referred to Lord Salisbury and to many other authorities, and finally to Lord Sydney, who wrote, from the Board of Green Cloth, 'that in 1849, at the Queen's Levee at Dublin Castle, the Roman Catholic Primate followed the Protestant Archbishop, but he was not a Cardinal. _A fortiori_ I presume a Cardinal as a Prince of the Holy Roman Empire would have precedence next to the Prince of Wales. It showed, however, extraordinary ignorance on the part of the Lord Steward to suppose that the Holy Roman Empire and the Papal Court were the same thing.' [Footnote: The story of how the question of precedence was settled in Manning's favour is given in detail in Mr. Bodley's _Cardinal Manning, and Other Essays_ (1912).] 'It was on February 12th that I received Sir Henry Ponsonby's letter announcing the approval of the Queen to the Prince serving on the Commission as an ordinary member under my chairmanship, and the Prince of Wales expressed his pleasure at the Queen's approval.'