ble his majesty to borrow a sum for the liquidation of a new arrear of three hundred thousand pounds, by a tax on salaries and penfions; for a debt to this amount had been again contracted by the shameful prodigality of the late ministers, notwithstanding the addition of one hundred thousand pounds per annum, so recently made to the civil lift.

The economical abolitions and retrenchments of the reform bill met with a violent oppofition in the upper house, from the lords Thurlow and Loughborough, but it finally paffed by a great majority. A bill fent up from the commons, for disfranchising certain voters of the borough of Cricklade, who had been proved guilty of the most shameful and scandalous acts of bribery, was also impeded and embaraffed in all its stages by the fame law lords, with every poffible fubtilty of legal quibble and chicanery, The duke of Richmond was upon this occafion provoked to charge the chancellor with indiscriminately oppofing every measure of regulation and improvement which was laid before the house. And lord Fortescue, with the unguarded warmth of aristocratic disdain, remarked, " that what he had long feared was at length come to pass;from the profusion of lawyers introduced into that house, it was no longer an house of lords, it was converted into a mere court of law, where all the folid and honorable principles of truth and justice were facrificed to the low and miferable chicanery used in Westminster hall. That once venerable, dignified, and august affembly now resembled more a meeting of pettifoggers than an house of parliament. With respect to the learned lord on the woolfack, who had now for some years presided in that house, he seemed to be fraught with nothing but contradictions and distinctions and law subtilties. As to himself," lord Fortescue with a noble pride added, " he had not attended a minister's levee, till very lately, for these forty years; and the present ministry he would fupport

no

no longer than they deserved it. But as they came into office upon the most honorable and laudable of all principles, the approbation of their sovereign, and the esteem and confidence of the nation, it filled his breast with indignation when he beheld their measures day after day thwarted and opposed, by men who resembled more a set of Cornish attornies than members of that right honorable house."

On the 3d of May, after a debate of fome length, it was refolved by the house of commons, " that all the declarations, orders, and resolutions of that house respecting the election of John Wilkes, efq. be expunged from the journals of the house, as fubverfive of the rights of the whole body of electors in the kingdom. Mr. Wilkes, in a public letter addressed to his constituents, " congratulated them on the signal reparation they had now obtained for their violated franchises, and the injuries they had fustained under the former flagitious administration." But on this point the feelings of the public were no longer in unison with those of Mr. Wilkes. The vote by which those resolutions were refcinded, which had thirteen years before, thrown the whole nation into a flame, was scarcely noticed; and the cafe of the Middlesex election was now regarded with nearly as much indifference as that of any other elective decision.

In the same month a fubject of infinitely higher importance, and of a nature truly and permanently interesting, was brought under the immediate cognizance of the house, in consequence of a motion made by Mr. Pitt for the appointment of a committee to enquire into the state of the representation of the people in parliament. It is remarkable, that notwithstanding the prodigious and glaring inequality of the national system of representation as now conftituted, the idea of a parliamentary reform may be confidered in great measure as a novelty in politics. The patriots of elder days, sensible of the dangers arifing

from the rapid and enormous increase of the regal influence, strongly and repeatedly urged the remedial meafures of triennial parliaments, of civil and military reductions, of place and penfion bills; but it was a species of merit referved for the present times to strike at the root of the evil, by an effort to extend and equalize that popular representation, on the purity and integrity of which the national profperity and welfare so effentially depend.

The evils attending this defective and corrupt state of the reprefentation had at no former period of our history been so flagrantly apparent as in the present reign; and it was with grief and indignation that the intelligent and independent part of the public faw the house of commons degenerate into an afsembly apparently poffeffing neither will, nor power, nor wisdom, but what they derived from the permiffion and fiat of the minister, who also frequently appeared himself the sport of some capricious and invisible agent. The affair of the Middlesex election, otherwife comparatively unimportant, wore in this view a most alarming aspect, as it shewed how far the house would venture to carry their complaisance to the crown, in oppofition to the decided, unanimous, and perfevering refiftance of the people. "The virtue, spirit, and essence of an house of commons," says Mr. Burke in his famous political tract published at that periodt, "consists in its being the express image of the feelings of the nation. An addreffing house of commons, and a petitioning nationan house of commons full of confidence when the nation is plunged in despair, who vote thanks when the nation calls upon them for impeachments, who are eager to grant when the general voice demands account, who in all disputes between the people and administration presume against the people, who punish their disorders, but refuse to enquire into the provocations to them:-this is

† Thoughts on the causes of the present discontents,

an

an unnatural, a monstrous state of things in this confti tution. Such an affembly is not to any popular purpose an house of COMMONS."

The obstinate profecution of the American war, and the contemptuous dismission of the petitions for a reform in the public expenditure, afforded still more recent and striking instances of obfequious and unlimited devotion on the part of the national representatives to the executive power, and their total difregard of the sentiments of their constituents. So struck was the late earl of Chatham with the obvious and manifold mischiefs arising from the prefent incongruous system, that he fcrupled not to hazard a peremptory prediction, that the rotten boroughs would not survive the prefent century-and that if parliament did not reform itself from WITHIN, it would be reformed with a VENGEANCE from WITHOUT." Nevertheless it must be acknowledged there were not wanting many wife and excellent persons, true and firm friends to liberty, whose minds forcibly revolted at the novelty and boldness of the idea of new-modelling the representation of the country. They conceived the actual advantages resulting from the constitution, when rightly administered, under the present form, too great to risque any experiment, however plaufible in theory, of such magnitude as to draw after it consequences which no human fagacity could pretend to trace or fathom,

Totally to annihilate the influence of the crown in the house of commons, would give such an afcendency to the republican part of the constitution, that the prerogative of the monarch would in a short time be reduced to as low an ebb as the authority of a king of Poland or a doge of Venice; the executive power would lose its weight and energy, and the state would be torn with the oppofite and equal claims of hoftile and contending factions. To afcertain the precise degree of influence which the monarch ought to poffefs, was indeed confeffed to be a diffi

cult

cult problem to folve. It is the radical and remediless defect of the British form of government, in other respects so admirable, that too much depends on the perfonal character of the sovereign; and under the reign of a weak, obftinate and bigoted prince, intoxicated with the pomp and pride of royalty, such as imagination can eafily feign, the excellence of that celebrated constitution may be put to a very fevere test indeed-particularly if, by an accidental concurrence of circumstances, such a monarch, thus palpably unfit to govern, should rise to high and undeferved popularity.

On the other hand, it may doubtless happen that the executive power may possess juster and more enlightened views of policy than the nation at large; and a more popular system of representation would in such circumftances be a real and serious evil. This was remarkably the cafe in the reigns of king William and king George I. who exerted with very incomplete success their utmost influence to extend and enlarge the general system of liberty. The grand object of every constitution of government which afpires on rational grounds to political perfection is not, as the wild and visionary speculatists of modern times abfurdly suppose, to carry the will of the majority at all events into effect, but to concentrate the wisdom, the knowledge, and the virtue of the community; to-endow them with influence, and arm them with power. Above all, it excited the alarm of the moderate, the judicious, and truly enlightened, that a great proportion, perhaps a majority, of the advocates for a parliamentary reform maintained the existence of certain abstract rights independent of utility, which is in truth the basis both of right and obligation-in conformity to which the people had a clear original, and imprescriptible claim to the privilege of UNI.. VERSAL SUFFRAGE, without the exercise of which it was pretended that no liberty could exift.

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The