It is very clear that we cannot free ourselves entirely from this great inconvenience; but I would not increase an evil, because I was not able to remove it; and because it was not in my power to keep the House of Commons religiously true to its first principles, I would not argue for carrying it to a total oblivion of them.  This has been the great scheme of power in our time.  They, who will not conform their conduct to the public good, and cannot support it by the prerogative of the crown, have adopted a new plan.  They have totally abandoned the shattered and old-fashioned fortress of prerogative, and made a lodgment in the stronghold of Parliament itself.  If they have any evil design to which there is no ordinary legal power commensurate, they bring it into Parliament.  In Parliament the whole is executed from the beginning to the end.  In Parliament the power of obtaining their object is absolute; and the safety in the proceeding perfect:  no rules to confine, no after-reckonings to terrify.  Parliament cannot, with any great propriety, punish others for things in which they themselves have been accomplices.  Thus the control of Parliament upon the executory power is lost; because Parliament is made to partake in every considerable act of government. Impeachment, that great guardian of the purity of the constitution, is in danger of being lost, even to the idea of it.

By this plan several important ends are answered to the cabal.  If the authority of Parliament supports itself, the credit of every act of government, which they contrive, is saved; but if the act be so very odious that the whole strength of Parliament is insufficient to recommend it, then Parliament is itself discredited; and this discredit increases more and more that indifference to the constitution, which it is the constant aim of its enemies, by their abuse of Parliamentary powers, to render general among the people.  Whenever Parliament is persuaded to assume the offices of executive government, it will lose all the confidence, love, and veneration, which it has ever enjoyed whilst it was supposed the corrective and control of the acting powers of the state.  This would be the event, though its conduct in such a perversion of its functions should be tolerably just and moderate; but if it should be iniquitous, violent, full of passion, and full of faction, it would be considered as the most intolerable of all the modes of tyranny.

For a considerable time this separation of the representatives from their constituents went on with a silent progress; and had those, who conducted the plan for their total separation, been persons of temper and abilities any way equal to the magnitude of their design, the success would have been infallible:  but by their precipitancy they have laid it open in all its nakedness; the nation is alarmed at it:  and the event may not be pleasant to the contrivers of the scheme.  In the last session, the corps called the king’s friends