standards for judging more systematically of the behaviour of those whom they had sent to Parliament.  Frequent and correct lists of the voters in all important questions ought to be procured.  The severest discouragement ought to be given to the pernicious practice of affording a blind and undistinguishing support to every administration.  “Parliamentary support comes and goes with office, totally regardless of the man or the merit.”  For instance, Wilkes’s annual motion to expunge the votes upon the Middlesex election had been uniformly rejected, as often as it was made while Lord North was in power.  Lord North had no sooner given way to the Rockingham Cabinet than the House of Commons changed its mind, and the resolutions were expunged by a handsome majority of 115 to 47.  Administration was omnipotent in the House, because it could be a man’s most efficient friend at an election, and could most amply reward his fidelity afterwards.  Against this system Burke called on the nation to set a stern face.  Root it up, he kept crying; settle the general course in which you desire members to go; insist that they shall not suffer themselves to be diverted from this by the authority of the government of the day; let lists of votes be published, so that you may ascertain for yourselves whether your trustees have been faithful or fraudulent; do all this, and there will be no need to resort to those organic changes, those empirical innovations, which may possibly cure, but are much more likely to destroy.

[Footnote 1:  “Observations on State of the Nation,” Works, i. 105, b.]

[Footnote 2:  “Speech on Duration of Parliaments.”]

It is not surprising that so halting a policy should have given deep displeasure to very many, perhaps to most, of those whose only common bond was the loose and negative sentiment of antipathy to the court, the ministry, and the too servile majority of the House of Commons.  The Constitutional Society was furious.  Lord Chatham wrote to Lord Rockingham that the work in which these doctrines first appeared, must do much mischief to the common cause.  But Burke’s view of the constitution was a part of his belief with which he never paltered, and on which he surrendered his judgment to no man.  “Our constitution,” in his opinion, “stands on a nice equipoise, with steep precipices and deep waters upon all sides of it.  In removing it from a dangerous leaning towards one side, there may be a risk of oversetting it on the other."[1] This image was ever before his mind.  It occurs again in the last sentence of that great protest against all change and movement, when he describes himself as one who, when the equipoise of the vessel in which he sails may be endangered by overloading it upon one side, is desirous of carrying the small weight of his reasons to that which may preserve its equipoise.[2] When we think of the odious mis-government in England which the constitution permitted, between the time when Burke wrote and the passing of