In the first Reform parliament, Jan. 1833, Macaulay took his seat as one of the two members for the new borough of Leeds. He replied to O'Connell in the debate on the address, meeting the great agitator with high, but not intemperate, defiance. In July he defended the Government of India bill in a speech of great power, and he was instrumental in getting the bill through com mittee without unnecessary friction. When the abolition of slav ery came before the house as a practical question, Macaulay had the prospect of having to surrender office or to vote for a modi fied abolition, viz., twelve years' apprenticeship, which was pro posed by the ministry, but condemned by the abolitionists. He placed his resignation in Lord Althorp's hands, and spoke against the ministerial proposal. But the sense of the house was so strongly expressed as unfavourable that, finding they would be beaten if they persisted, the ministry gave way, and reduced ap prenticeship to seven years, a compromise which the abolition party accepted ; and Macaulay remained at the board of control. He then (1834) accepted a seat in the supreme council of India, created by the new India Act. The salary of the office was fixed at L o,000, out of which he calculated to be able to save £30,000 in five years.
Macaulay's appointment to India occurred at the critical mo ment when the government of the company was being superseded by government by the Crown. At this juncture there was more need of statesmanship directed by general liberal principles than of a practical knowledge of the details of Indian administration. The part he took in India has been described as "the application of sound liberal principles to a government which had till then been jealous, close and repressive." He vindicated the liberty of the press; he maintained the equality of Europeans and natives before the law ; and as president of the committee of public instruction he inaugurated the system of national education. Ma caulay was appointed president of a commission to inquire into Indian jurisprudence. The draft of a penal code which he sub mitted became the basis of the Indian criminal code.
In 1838 Macaulay and his sister Hannah, who had married Charles Trevelyan in 1834, returned to England. He at once entered parliament as member for Edinburgh. In 1839 he became secretary for war, with a seat in the cabinet in Lord Melbourne's ministry. His acceptance of office diverted him for a time from prosecuting the plan he had already formed of a great historical work. But in less than two years the Melbourne ministry fell. In 1842 appeared his Lays of Ancient Rome, and in the next year he collected and published his Essays. He returned to office in 1846, in Lord John Russell's administration, as paymaster-general. In the sessions of 1846-1847 he spoke only five times, and at the general election of July 1847 he lost his seat for Edinburgh. The
balance of Macaulay's faculties had now passed to the side of literature. At an earlier date he had relished crowds and the excitement of ever new faces ; as years went forward, and absorp tion in the work of composition took off the edge of his spirits, he recoiled from publicity.
He retired into private life with a sense of relief. He gradually withdrew from general society, but he still enjoyed close and constant intercourse with a circle of the most eminent men that London then contained. At that time social breakfasts were in vogue. Macaulay himself preferred this to any other form of entertainment. Of these brilliant reunions nothing has been pre served beyond the names of the men who formed them—Rogers, Hallam, Sydney Smith, Lord Carlisle, Lord Stanhope, Nassau Senior, Charles Greville, Milman, Panizzi, G. C. Lewis, Van de Weyer. His biographer thus describes Macaulay's appearance and bearing in conversation : "Sitting bolt upright, his hands resting on the arms of his chair, or folded over the handle of his walking stick, knitting his eyebrows if the subject was one which had to be thought out as he went along, or brightening from the f ore head downwards when a burst of humour was coming, his massive features and honest glance suited well with the manly sagacious sentiments which he set forth in his sonorous voice and in his racy and intelligible language. To get at his meaning people had never the need to think twice, and they certainly had seldom the time." In these years he was working with unflagging industry at the composition of his History. His composition was slow, his cor rections both of matter and style endless; he spared no pains to ascertain the facts. He sacrificed to the prosecution of his task a political career, House of Commons fame, the allurements of society. The first two volumes of the History of England appeared in Dec. 1848. The success was in every way complete beyond expectation. The sale of edition after edition, both in England and the United States, was enormous.
In 1852, when his party returned to office, he refused a seat in the cabinet, but the city of Edinburgh returned him at the head of the poll at the general election in July of that year. He had hardly accepted the summons to return to parliamentary life before fatal weakness betrayed itself in deranged action of the heart ; from this time forward till his death his strength con tinued steadily to sink. He was oppressed by the thought that the great work to which he had devoted himself would remain a f rag ment. Once again, in June 1853, he spoke in parliament, and with effect, against the exclusion of the master of the rolls from the House of Commons, and at a later date in defence of competition for the Indian civil service. But he was aware that he made these efforts at the cost of more valuable work.