In speaking of this body, I have my eye chiefly on the House of Commons.  I hope I shall be indulged in a few observations on the nature and character of that assembly; not with regard to its legal form and power, but to its spirit, and to the purposes it is meant to answer in the constitution.

The House of Commons was supposed originally to be no part of the standing government of this country.  It was considered as a control issuing immediately from the people, and speedily to be resolved into the mass from whence it arose.  In this respect it was in the higher part of government what juries are in the lower.  The capacity of a magistrate being transitory, and that of a citizen permanent, the latter capacity it was hoped would of course preponderate in all discussions, not only between the people and the standing authority of the crown, but between the people and the fleeting authority of the House of Commons itself.  It was hoped that, being of a middle nature between subject and government, they would feel with a more tender and a nearer interest everything that concerned the people, than the other remoter and more permanent parts of legislature.

Whatever alterations time and the necessary accommodation of business may have introduced, this character can never be sustained, unless the House of Commons shall be made to bear some stamp of the actual disposition of the people at large.  It would (among public misfortunes) be an evil more natural and tolerable, that the House of Commons should be infected with every epidemical frenzy of the people, as this would indicate some consanguinity, some sympathy of nature with their constituents, than that they should in all cases be wholly untouched by the opinions and feelings of the people out of doors.  By this want of sympathy they would cease to be a House of Commons.  For it is not the derivation of the power of that House from the people, which makes it in a distinct sense their representative.  The king is the representative of the people; so are the lords; so are the judges.  They all are trustees for the people, as well as the commons; because no power is given for the sole sake of the holder; and although government certainly is an institution of divine authority, yet its forms, and the persons who administer it, all originate from the people.

A popular origin cannot therefore be the characteristical distinction of a popular representative.  This belongs equally to all parts of government and in all forms.  The virtue, spirit, and essence of a House of Commons consists in its being the express image of the feelings of the nation.  It was not instituted to be a control upon the people, as of late it has been taught, by a doctrine of the most pernicious tendency.  It was designed as a control for the people.  Other institutions have been formed for the purpose of checking popular excesses; and they are, I apprehend, fully adequate