other peers, had been dismissed from Lord-lieutenancies, as a punishment for voting against the ministry; such dismissals being a flagrant attempt to put down all freedom of debate in Parliament, which of all its privileges is the one most essential to its usefulness, if not to its very existence.  But, as Burke said, the practice had been abandoned, and the first resolution, therefore, as Lord North said, involved no practical result.  It is the second resolution that confers a constitutional character and importance on this debate.  And it is not too much to say that no vote of greater value had been come to for many years.  It might have been considered almost as the assertion of a truism included in the power of granting supplies, to declare that the Parliament has the right and authority to examine into and correct abuses in the expenditure, if it had not been denied by more than one speaker on the ministerial side, though not by the Prime-minister himself.  But that denial made the assertion of the right an imperative duty; for certainly the exclusive right of authorizing a levy of money would lose half its value, if unaccompanied by the other right of preventing the waste of the revenue thus raised.

It may likewise be said that another principle of the parliamentary constitution is, by implication, contained in Mr. Dunning’s second resolution, and that the words, “it is competent to this House to examine into and to correct abuses in the expenditure,” were meant to imply a denial of the competency of the other House to institute, or even to share in, such an examination.  Even if that were the object of its framer, it only coincided with the view of the peers themselves, a very considerable majority[68] of whom had, a few weeks before, rejected a motion made by Lord Shelburne for the appointment of “a committee of members of both Houses to examine without delay into the public expenditure,” principally on the ground urged by the Secretary of State, Lord Stormont, and by several other peers, that “to inquire into, reform, and control the public expenditure” would be an improper interference with the privileges of the Commons; the Chief-justice, Lord Mansfield, even going the length of warning his brother peers that such interference might probably lead the Commons “to dispute in their turn the power of judicature in the last resort exercised by the peers.”  Lord Camden, on the contrary, affirmed, as a proposition which “no noble lord present would deny, that that House had a right to inquire so far as the disposal of public moneys came under their cognizance as a deliberative body.”  And in the Lower House itself, Burke, in his speech in favor of his Bill for Economical Reform, went even farther than Lord Camden, and blamed the House of Lords for rejecting Lord Shelburne’s motion on such a ground.  “They had gone,” he said, “farther in self-denial than the utmost jealousy of the Commons could have required.  A power of examining accounts, of censuring, correcting,