action in the House of Commons. No doubt his laudable experiment of governing by means of both parties had had results with which he could hardly have been satisfied. But he had borne for five years with the parliamentary factiousness which that experiment had undoubtedly tended to aggravate, and there is no visible reason, save that which I have indicated, for his putting an end to the experiment at this particular moment and in this particular way. He had made shift to do without a homogeneous Ministry ever since his accession. If now he needed a Ministry which should be not only homogeneous, but homogeneously Whig, we must look to the exigencies of his continental policy for the cause. The process, however, of replacing the Tories of the Administration by Whigs was a very gradual one, and it was not of course until it was complete that the Whig party in the House of Commons could be trusted to support the Administration, "right or wrong," as, without much suspicion of satire, we may say to have now become the accepted constitutional practice. Nottingham and the Tory Naval administrators were the first to go, their retirement having been in the one case consequentially, and in the other directly necessitated by the narrow escape of the latter from parliamentary censure in respect of the late naval miscarriages. Russell became First Lord of the Admiralty, and with him Nottingham, who, as Secretary of State, was then responsible for the military service, was of course unable to serve. His place, however, was not immediately filled up, nor was it till the end of the session that any further ministerial changes were made. And this session itself was one of peculiar constitutional interest on other grounds. In the first place the Triennial Bill, vetoed by William in the previous session, was reintroduced, and met with a most unexpected fate. It was brought in this time in the House of Commons, and passed through all its stages up to the final one without a division. But the motion that "the Bill do now pass" was rejected by a majority of ten. The whole affair is involved in much obscurity, and the cause or causes of the unlooked-for rejection of the measure must always remain matter of conjecture. Macaulay declares its defeat to have been brought about by the instrumentality of the expert parliamentary intriguer Seymour; and as no House of Commons that ever lived is likely to have relished the idea of putting a term to its own existence, it is not difficult to guess the kind of sentiment to which Seymour might have appealed. But one point not unworthy of notice in the matter is that the numbers voting in the division, 146 Noes and 136 Ayes, did not together compose a very full House. They fell short by thirty-two of the numbers who voted in the division by which the second edition of the Triennial Bill, introduced in, and passed through, the House of Lords, and sent down to the House of Commons, was rejected a fortnight afterwards.