conduct by refusing to re-elect him; in which case the Government would, of course, have found themselves at the end of the transaction with one piece of patronage the less, but not with one vote the more. In a word, the Place Bill, as amended by the Lords, though it would have left untouched the power of the Crown to bring office-holders into Parliament, would materially have impaired its power of turning members of Parliament into office-holders; and apparently it was only because Macaulay viewed the Bill too exclusively in its relation to the former power, and took no account of its bearing on the latter, that he could have regarded it as a measure in which William had no real concern, and which he only vetoed through some vague dislike of it as affecting his prerogative he hardly knew how. So far from this, it seems to me that his objection may well have been a very definite one, and that he perfectly understood, and was not at all disposed to undervalue, the particular exercise of his prerogative which it threatened. For whatever may have been his original or even his persistent repugnance to the acts of parliamentary management by means of parliamentary corruption, he had probably come by this time to regard it as among the inevitable if disagreeable necessities of royal and ministerial policy under the English system of party government. The close of this session witnessed the virtual completion of the work of ministerial reconstruction on a purely Whig basis. Shrewsbury, who had been offered the Secretaryship of State left vacant by the retirement of Nottingham, after some months of hesitation accepted the office. Trenchard, the other Secretary of State, was also a member of the Whig party. The rising Whig financier, Charles Montague, who had during this session devised and carried out the legislative measure for the establishment of the Bank of England, was for this service elevated to the post of Chancellor of the Exchequer. The Keeper of the Seal was the Whig Somers. The Whig Russell was First Lord of the Admiralty. All the important offices of the State were now in fact in the hands of the Whig party, and William, now fairly embarked upon the experiment recommended by Sunderland, made one last concession to his old policy of balancing one party against the other by a liberal distribution of honours among the displaced Tories.