Five hundred thousand pounds is a serious sum.  But it is nothing to the prolific principle upon which the sum was voted:  a principle that may be well called, the fruitful mother of an hundred more.  Neither is the damage to public credit of very great consequence, when compared with that which results to public morals and to the safety of the constitution, from the exhaustless mine of corruption opened by the precedent, and to be wrought by the principle, of the late payment of the debts of the civil list.  The power of discretionary disqualification by one law of Parliament, and the necessity of paying every debt of the civil list by another law of Parliament, if suffered to pass unnoticed, must establish such a fund of rewards and terrors as will make Parliament the best appendage and support of arbitrary power that ever was invented by the wit of man.  This is felt.  The quarrel is begun between the representatives and the people.  The court faction have at length committed them.

In such a strait the wisest may well be perplexed, and the boldest staggered.  The circumstances are in a great measure new.  We have hardly any landmarks from the wisdom of our ancestors, to guide us.  At best we can only follow the spirit of their proceeding in other cases.  I know the diligence with which my observations on our public disorders have been made; I am very sure of the integrity of the motives on which they are published; I cannot be equally confident in any plan for the absolute cure of those disorders, or for their certain future prevention.  My aim is to bring this matter into more public discussion.  Let the sagacity of others work upon it.  It is not uncommon for medical writers to describe histories of diseases very accurately, on whose cure they can say but very little.

The first ideas which generally suggest themselves, for the cure of Parliamentary disorders, are, to shorten the duration of Parliaments; and to disqualify all, or a great number of placemen, from a seat in the House of Commons.  Whatever efficacy there may be in those remedies, I am sure in the present state of things it is impossible to apply them.  A restoration of the right of free election is a preliminary indispensable to every other reformation.  What alterations ought afterwards to be made in the constitution, is a matter of deep and difficult research.

If I wrote merely to please the popular palate, it would indeed be as little troublesome to me as to another, to extol these remedies, so famous in speculation, but to which their greatest admirers have never attempted seriously to resort in practice.  I confess then, that I have no sort of reliance upon either a triennial Parliament, or a place-bill.  With regard to the former, perhaps it might rather serve to counteract, than to promote the ends that are proposed by it.  To say nothing of the horrible disorders among the people attending frequent elections, I should be fearful