Page:History of the Radical Party in Parliament.djvu/317

1841.1 Accession of the Queen to fall of Melbourne. 303 session. This had been forced upon the Government by external agitation, which had found expression in Parliament through Wallace, the Radical member for Greenock. The writings and speeches of Rowland Hill, especially his work, " Post Office Reform : its Importance and Practicability," had proved that a complete change of system was not only necessary, but easy of attainment, and, unlike too many social reformers, he was destined not only to see the adoption of his principles, but to take an active part in their realization. The Peers were fortunately unable to stop the educational movement proposed by Government, but where they could arrest Liberal action they did. The annual farce connected with Irish municipal reform was again performed. The House of Commons passed a bill, which was altered in the other Chamber in a manner which made it unacceptable. As ministers were not strong enough to enter upon a contest with the Lords, they did as they had done before dropped the measure, and postponed the subject to another session. Parliament was prorogued on the nth of August. The discredit into which the Melbourne Government had fallen had been increased, in the popular mind, by the suffering consequent upon a long season of commercial and agricultural distress ; and in the opinion of thoughtful men, by the utter failure of their financial policy. The word policy can, indeed, hardly be applied to the feeble hand-to-mouth proposals which had from year to year been brought forward by Spring Rice, the Whig Chancellor of the Exchequer. His predictions had been rarely justified, his plans rarely successful, and the consequence had been a series of deficiencies which grew so far beyond his control, that in this his last year of office he did not even attempt to equalize the receipts and expenditure, but left a nominal deficit of over half a million, which was further increased by a million, owing to the decrease of revenue from the post-office during the first year of the new experi- ment. It was not surprising, therefore, that at the. end of the session Rice should have been anxious to resign, nor that his colleagues should have been willing to allow him to