But in Parliament Pitt was as powerless as he was influential in the country. His renewed proposal of Parliamentary Reform, though he set aside the disfranchisement of rotten boroughs as a violation of private property, and limited himself to the disfranchisement of boroughs convicted of corruption, and to the addition of one hundred members to the county representation, was rejected by a majority of two to one. Secure in their parliamentary majority, and heedless of the power of public opinion outside the walls of the House of Commons, the new Ministers entered boldly on a greater task than had as yet taxed the constructive genius of English statesmen. To leave such a dominion as Warren Hastings had built up in India to the control of a mere Company of traders was clearly impossible; and Fox proposed to transfer its political government from the Directors of the Company to a board of seven Commissioners. The appointment of the seven was vested in the first instance in Parliament, and afterwards in the Crown; their office was to be held for five years, but they were removable on address from either House of Parliament. The proposal was at once met with a storm of opposition. The scheme indeed was an injudicious one; for the new Commissioners would have been destitute of that practical knowledge of India which belonged to the Company, while the want of any immediate link between them and the actual Ministry of the Crown would have prevented Parliament from exercising an effective control over their acts. But the real faults of this India Bill were hardly noticed in the popular outcry against it. It had challenged the hostility of powerful influences. The merchant-class was galled by the blow levelled at the greatest merchant-body in the realm: corporations trembled at the cancelling of a charter; the king viewed the measure as a mere means of transferring the patronage of India to the Whigs. But it might have defied the opposition of corporations and the king had it not had to meet the bitter hostility of the nation at large. With the nation the faults of the bill lay not in this detail or that, but in the character of the Ministry which proposed it. To give the rule and patronage of India over to the existing House of Commons was to give a new and immense power to a body which misused in the grossest way the power it possessed. It was the sense of this popular feeling which encouraged the king to exert his personal influence to defeat the measure in the Lords, and on its defeat to order his Ministers to deliver up the seals. The unpopularity of Shelburne stood in the way of his resumption of office, and in December 1783 Pitt accepted the post of First Lord of the Treasury. His position would at once have been untenable had the country gone with its nominal representatives. He was defeated again and again by large majorities in the Commons; but the majorities dwindled as a shower of addresses from every quarter, from the Tory University of Oxford as from the Whig Corporation of London, proved that public opinion went with the Minister and not with the House. It was the general sense of this that justified Pitt in the firmness with which, in the teeth of addresses for his removal from office, he delayed the dissolution of Parliament for five months, and gained time for that ripening of the national sentiment on which he counted for success. When the election of 1784 came the struggle was at once at an end. The public feeling took a strength which broke through the corrupt influences that commonly governed its representation. Every great constituency, the counties and the large towns, returned supporters of Pitt. Of the majority which had defeated him in the Commons, a hundred and sixty members were unseated. Fox hardly retained his seat for Westminster, Burke lost his seat for Bristol, and only a fragment of the Whig party was saved by its command of nomination boroughs.