Burke, in a speech which he delivered in his place in 1771, warned the House of the evils of the course upon which they were entering, and declared those to be their mortal enemies who would persuade them to act as if they were a self-originated magistracy, independent of the people, and unconnected with their opinions and feelings.  But these mortal enemies of its very constitution were at this time the majority of the House.  It was to no purpose that Burke argued with more than legal closeness that incapacitation could not be a power according to law, inasmuch as it had neither of the two properties of law:  it was not known, “you yourselves not knowing upon what grounds you will vote the incapacity of any man;” and it was not fixed, because it was varied according to the occasion, exercised according to discretion, and no man could call for it as a right.  A strain of unanswerable reasoning of this kind counted for nothing, in spite of its being unanswerable.  Despotic or oligarchic pretensions are proof against the most formidable battery that reason and experience can construct against them.  And Wilkes’s exclusion endured until this Parliament—­the Unreported Parliament, as it was called, and in many respects the very worst that ever assembled at Westminster—­was dissolved, and a new one elected (1774), when he was once again returned for Middlesex, and took his seat.

The London multitude had grown zealous for Wilkes, and the town had been harassed by disorder.  Of the fierce brutality of the crowd of that age, we may form a vivid idea from the unflinching pencil of Hogarth.  Barbarous laws were cruelly administered.  The common people were turbulent, because misrule made them miserable.  Wilkes had written filthy verses, but the crowd cared no more for this than their betters cared about the vices of Lord Sandwich.  They made common cause with one who was accidentally a more conspicuous sufferer.  Wilkes was quite right when he vowed that he was no Wilkite.  The masses were better than their leader.  “Whenever the people have a feeling,” Burke once said, “they commonly are in the right:  they sometimes mistake the physician.”  Franklin, who was then in London, was of opinion that if George III. had had a bad character, and John Wilkes a good one, the latter might have turned the former out of the kingdom; for the turbulence that began in street riots, at one time threatened to end in revolt.  The king himself was attacked with savage invective in papers, of which it was said that no one in the previous century would have dared to print any like them until Charles was fast locked up in Carisbrooke Castle.