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As has been already mentioned, the King at once dismissed the Coalition Ministry. Mr. Pitt accepted the conduct of affairs, and by so doing accepted the responsibility for all the acts of the King which had conduced to his appointment. Lord John Russell, who in his "Memorials and Correspondence of Fox" has related and examined the whole transaction at considerable though not superfluous length, while blaming the prudence, and in some points the propriety, of Fox's conduct, at the same time severely censures Pitt as "committing a great fault in accepting office as the price of an unworthy intrigue," and affirms that "he and his colleagues who accepted office upon the success of this intrigue placed themselves in an unconstitutional position."[92] This seems to be a charge which can hardly be borne out. In dismissing his former ministry, the King was clearly acting within his right; and, if so, Pitt was equally within his in undertaking the government. The truer doctrine would seem to be, that, in so undertaking it, he assumed the entire responsibility for the dismissal of his predecessors,[93] and left it to the people at large, by the votes of their representatives, to decide whether that dismissal were justified, and whether, as its inevitable consequence, his acceptance of office were also justified or not. The entire series of transactions, from the meeting of Parliament in November, 1783, to its dissolution in the following March, may be constitutionally regarded as an appeal by the King from the existing House of Commons to the entire nation, as represented by the constituencies; and their verdict, as is well known, ratified in the most emphatic manner all that had been done. And we may assert this without implying that, if the single act of empowering Lord Temple to influence the peers by the declaration of the King's private feeling had been submitted by itself to the electors, they would have justified that. The stirring excitement of the three months' contest between the great rivals led them to pronounce upon the transaction as a whole, and to leave unnoticed what seemed for the moment to be the minor issues-the moves, if we may borrow a metaphor from the chess-table, which opened the game; and it may be observed that, though, on the 17th of December, Pitt resisted Mr. Baker's resolution with his utmost energy, in the numerous debates which ensued he carefully avoided all allusion to Lord Temple's conduct, or to the measure which had led to the dismissal of his predecessors, farther than was necessary for the explanation of the principles of his own India Bill. It may even be surmised that, if he had been inclined to recognize Lord Temple's interference as warrantable, the breach between that peer and himself, which occurred before the end of the week, would not have taken place, since it seems nearly certain that the cause of that breach was a refusal on the part of Pitt to recommend his cousin for promotion in the peerage, a step which, at such a moment, would have had the appearance of an approval of his most recent deed,[94] but which he could hardly have refused, if it had been done with his privity. The battle, as need hardly be told, was first fought among the representatives of the people in the House of Commons; for there was only one occasion on which the opinion of the Lords was invited, when they declared in favor of Pitt by a decisive majority.[95] But in the Lower House the contest was carried on for more than two months with extraordinary activity and ability, by a series of resolutions and motions brought forward by the partisans of the coalition, and contested by the youthful minister. In one respect the war was waged on very unequal terms, Pitt, who had been but three years in Parliament, and whose official experience could as yet only be counted by months, having to contend almost single-handed against the combined experience and eloquence of Lord North, Fox, and Burke. Fortunately, however, for him, their own mismanagement soon turned the advantage to his side. They were too angry and too confident to be skilful, or even ordinarily cautious. The leaders on both sides made professions in one respect similar; they both alike denied that a desire of office influenced either their conduct or their language (a denial for which Pitt's refusal of the Treasury, a year before, gained him more credit than could be expected by Fox after his coalition with Lord North), and both alike professed to be struggling for the constitution alone, for some fundamental principle which each charged his antagonist with violating; Fox on one occasion even going so far as, in some degree, to involve the King himself in his censures, declaring not only that "the struggle was, in fact, one between Pitt himself and the constitution," but that it was also one "between liberty and the influence of the crown," and "between prerogative and the constitution;" and that "Pitt had been brought into power by means absolutely subversive of the constitution."[96] But no act of which he thus accused the minister or the King showed such a disregard of the fundamental principle of the constitution of Parliament as was exhibited by Fox himself when, in the very first debate after the Christmas recess, he called in question that most undoubted prerogative of the crown to dissolve the Parliament, and, drawing a distinction which had certainly never been heard of before, declared that, though the King had an incontestable right to dissolve the Parliament after the close of a session, "many great lawyers" doubted whether he had such a right in the middle of a session, a dissolution at such a period being "a penal" one. Professing to believe that an immediate dissolution was intended, he even threatened to propose to the House of Commons "measures to guard against a step so inimical to the true interests of the country," and made a more direct attack than ever on the King himself, by the assertion of a probability that, even if Pitt did not contemplate a dissolution, his royal master might employ "secret influence" to overrule him, and might dissolve in spite of him,[97] an imputation which Lord North, with a strange departure from his customary good-humor, condescended to endorse.[98] There could be no doubt that both the doubt and the menace were of themselves distinct attacks on the constitution; and they were, moreover, singularly impolitic and inconsistent with others of the speaker's arguments, since, if the nation at large approved of his views and conduct, a dissolution-which would have placed the decision in its hands-would have been the very thing he should most have desired. On another evening, though he admitted as a principle that the sovereign had the prerogative of choosing his ministers, he not only sought to narrow the effect of that admission by the assertion that "to exercise that prerogative in opposition to the House of Commons would be a measure as unsafe as unjustifiable,"[99] but to confine the right of deciding the title of the ministers to confidence to the existing House of Commons. He accused Pitt of "courting the affection of the people, and on this foundation wishing to support himself in opposition to the repeated resolutions of the House passed in the last three weeks." Had he confined himself to urging the necessity of the ministers and the House of Commons being in harmony, even though such a mention of the House of Commons by itself were to a certain extent an ignoring of the weight of the other branches of the Legislature, he would have only been advancing a doctrine which is practically established at the present day, since there has been certainly more than one instance in which a ministry has retired which enjoyed the confidence of both the sovereign and the House of Lords, because it was not supported by a majority in the House of Commons. But when he proceeded to make it a charge against the minister that he trusted to the good-will of the people to enable him to disregard the verdict of the House of Commons, he forgot that it was only as representing the people that the House had any right to pronounce a verdict; and that, if it were true that the judgment of the people was more favorable to the minister than that of the House of Commons, the difference which thus existed was a condemnation of the existing House, and an irresistible reason for calling on the constituencies to elect another.