Every artifice of sedition has been since practised to awaken discontent and inflame indignation.  The papers of every day have been filled with exhortations and menaces of faction.  The madness has spread through all ranks, and through both sexes; women and children have clamoured for Mr. Wilkes; honest simplicity has been cheated into fury, and only the wise have escaped infection.

The greater part may justly be suspected of not believing their own position, and with them it is not necessary to dispute.  They cannot be convinced who are convinced already, and it is well known that they will not be ashamed.  The decision, however, by which the smaller number of votes was preferred to the greater, has perplexed the minds of some, whose opinions it were indecent to despise, and who, by their integrity, well deserve to have their doubts appeased.

Every diffuse and complicated question may be examined by different methods, upon different principles; and that truth, which is easily found by one investigator, may be missed by another, equally honest and equally diligent.

Those who inquire, whether a smaller number of legal votes can elect a representative in opposition to a greater, must receive, from every tongue, the same answer.

The question, therefore, must be, whether a smaller number of legal votes shall not prevail against a greater number of votes not legal.

It must be considered, that those votes only are legal which are legally given, and that those only are legally given, which are given for a legal candidate.

It remains, then, to be discussed, whether a man expelled can be so disqualified by a vote of the house, as that he shall be no longer eligible by lawful electors.

Here we must again recur, not to positive institutions, but to the unwritten law of social nature, to the great and pregnant principle of political necessity.  All government supposes subjects; all authority implies obedience:  to suppose in one the right to command what another has the right to refuse, is absurd and contradictory; a state, so constituted, must rest for ever in motionless equipoise, with equal attractions of contrary tendency, with equal weights of power balancing each other.

Laws which cannot be enforced can neither prevent nor rectify disorders.  A sentence which cannot be executed can have no power to warn or to reform.  If the commons have only the power of dismissing, for a few days, the man whom his constituents can immediately send back; if they can expel, but cannot exclude, they have nothing more than nominal authority, to which, perhaps, obedience never may be paid.

The representatives of our ancestors had an opinion very different:  they fined and imprisoned their members; on great provocation, they disabled them for ever; and this power of pronouncing perpetual disability is maintained by Selden himself.

These claims seem to have been made and allowed, when the constitution of our government had not yet been sufficiently studied.  Such powers are not legal, because they are not necessary; and of that power which only necessity justifies, no more is to be admitted than necessity obtrudes.