CHAPTER VI.
A Census is Ordered .-- Dissolution of Pitt's Administration .-- Impeachment of Lord Melville .-- Introduction of Lord Ellenborough into the Cabinet .-- Abolition of the Slave-trade .-- Mr.Windham's Compulsory Training Bill .-- Illness of the King, and Regency .-- Recurrence to the Precedent of 1788-'89 .-- Death of Mr.Perceval .-- Lord Liverpool becomes Prime-minister .-- Question of Appointments in the Household .-- Appointment of a Prime-minister.
The Union with Ireland was the last great work of Pitt's first administration, and a noble close to the legislation of the eighteenth century.

But the last months of the year were also signalized by another enactment, which, though it cannot be said to have anything of a character strictly entitled to the name of constitutional, nevertheless established a practice so valuable as the foundation of a great part of our domestic legislation, that it will, perhaps, hardly be considered foreign to the scope and purpose of this volume to record its commencement.

In November, 1800, Mr.Abbott, the member for Helstone, brought in a bill to take a census of the people of the United Kingdom, pointing out not only the general importance of a knowledge of the population of a country in its entire amount and its different classes to every government, but also its special bearing on agriculture and on the means requisite to provide subsistence for the people, on trade and manufactures, and on our resources for war.

Such a census as he proposed had been more than once taken in Holland, Sweden, Spain, and even in the United States, young as was their separate national existence; it had been taken once--nearly fifty years previous--in Scotland; and something like one had been furnished in England in the reign of Edward III.

by a subsidy roll, and in that of Elizabeth by diocesan returns furnished by the Bishops to the Privy Council.[148] He farther argued for the necessity of such a proceeding from the different notions entertained by men of sanguine or desponding tempers as to the increase or diminution of the population.