committees that had formerly been employed to discredit the judgments of
the whole House. The success or failure of a petition again became a
party question; and as in a committee of an odd number the
ministerialists or the Opposition must inevitably have a majority of at
least one member, before the end of the reign it had become as easy to
foretell the result of a petition from the composition of the committee
as it had been in the time of Walpole. And it was with the approval of
almost all parties--an approval extorted only by the absolute necessity
of the case--that, after one or two modifications of Mr. Grenville's act
had been tried, Mr. Disraeli induced the House to surrender altogether
its privilege of judging of elections, and to submit the investigations
of petitions on such subjects to the only tribunal sufficiently above
suspicion to command and retain the confidence of the nation, the judges
of the high courts of law.

We shall probably be doing the House of Commons of the day no injustice,
if we surmise that the degree in which public attention had recently
been directed to the representation, and the interest which the people
were beginning to show in the purity of elections, as the principle on
the maintenance of which the very liberties of all might depend, had
some share in leading the House to establish the wholly new, though most
necessary, precedent of punishing a constituency for habitual and
inveterate corruption. It may be called the first fruits of Mr.
Grenville's act. At the end of the same year in which that statute had
been passed, a select committee had sat to try the merits of a petition
which complained of an undue return for the borough of New Shoreham. And
its report brought to light an organized system of corruption, which
there was too much reason to fear was but a specimen of that which
prevailed in many other boroughs as yet undetected. It appeared from the
report, founded as it was on the evidence and confession of many of the