veto this quite harmless and almost useless law, because he "understood the question as little as the Commons themselves." This is not a very plausible theory; nor does one well see why Macaulay should describe that proviso of a right to re-election--which was afterwards adopted, and which is an essential feature of our still subsisting Act of Anne--as depriving the Bill of nine-tenths of its power both for good and for evil. Surely both King and Parliament might have been credited with knowing their own business a little better than that. It seems reasonable rather to ask ourselves whether the amendment was such as to militate in any serious degree against the legislative object of the Commons, or in any similar degree to disarm the objections which William entertained to the measure. If it did neither of these things, there was nothing paradoxical either in the Commons accepting or the King pronouncing his veto upon the Place Bill; and it seems to me to be clear that the amendment did neither of these things in fact. No doubt it was desirable, from the point of view of the majority, that office-holders should cease to sit in Parliament and become incapacitated for re-election; and this on the abstract and general ground that such persons were not sufficiently independent to be able to discharge the functions of legislators with advantage to the country. So far, then, as the general principle relating to office-holders was concerned, the amendment was opposed to the real wishes of the Commons, and had no reason therefore to provoke the hostility of the King. But there was a specific ground on which the House had cause to dislike office-holders, and a specific class of appointments to which this ground applied; and the Bill, even as modified by the Lords' proviso, would have limited the royal influence in respect of these appointments to an extent quite sufficient to account both for the Commons adopting the amendment of the Upper House, and for the King refusing his assent to the Bill. It would obviously have dealt a heavy, though not, of course, a final, blow to the employment of the patronage of the Crown for the purpose of "managing" the Legislature. It would have made it a far more difficult thing for the Court or the Government to maintain their majority in the House of Commons by what would now be called a corrupt use of its patronage, but what was then regarded, or getting to be regarded--at any rate by the party in power,--as one of the legitimate arts of rule. For whenever the Sovereign or his Ministers endeavoured to convert a hostile into a friendly vote by the bestowal of office upon its possessor, he or they would always have to reckon with the possibility that the constituents of the bought member might not care to have their interests sold along with their parliamentary representative. They might, and on a question which strongly moved them they very probably would, have expressed their disapproval of his