tends to intimidate individual members from proposing, or this House from receiving, debating, and passing bills, tends to prevent even the beginning of every reformation in the state, and utterly destroys the deliberative capacity of Parliament.  We therefore claim, demand, and insist upon it, as our undoubted right, that no persons shall be deemed proper objects of animadversion by the crown, in any mode whatever, for the votes which they give or the propositions which they make in Parliament.

We humbly conceive, that besides its share of the legislative power, and its right of impeachment, that, by the law and usage of Parliament, this House has other powers and capacities, which it is bound to maintain.  This House is assured that our humble advice on the exercise of prerogative will be heard with the same attention with which it has ever been regarded, and that it will be followed by the same effects which it has ever produced, during the happy and glorious reigns of his Majesty’s royal progenitors,—­not doubting but that, in all those points, we shall be considered as a council of wisdom and weight to advise, and not merely as an accuser of competence to criminate.[64] This House claims both capacities; and we trust that we shall be left to our free discretion which of them we shall employ as best calculated for his Majesty’s and the national service.  Whenever we shall see it expedient to offer our advice concerning his Majesty’s servants, who are those of the public, we confidently hope that the personal favor of any minister, or any set of ministers, will not be more dear to his Majesty than the credit and character of a House of Commons.  It is an experiment full of peril to put the representative wisdom and justice of his Majesty’s people in the wrong; it is a crooked and desperate design, leading to mischief, the extent of which no human wisdom can foresee, to attempt to form a prerogative party in the nation, to be resorted to as occasion shall require, in derogation, from the authority of the Commons of Great Britain in Parliament assembled; it is a contrivance full of danger, for ministers to set up the representative and constituent bodies of the Commons of this kingdom as two separate and distinct powers, formed to counterpoise each other, leaving the preference in the hands of secret advisers of the crown.  In such a situation of things, these advisers, taking advantage of the differences which may accidentally arise or may purposely be fomented between them, will have it in their choice to resort to the one or the other, as may best suit the purposes of their sinister ambition.  By exciting an emulation and contest between the representative and the constituent bodies, as parties contending for credit and influence at the throne, sacrifices will be made by both; and the whole can end in nothing else than the destruction of the dearest rights and liberties of the nation.  If there must be another mode of conveying the collective sense of the people to the throne than that by the House of Commons, it ought to be fixed and defined, and its authority ought to be settled:  it ought not to exist in so precarious and dependent a state as that ministers should have it in their power, at their own mere pleasure, to acknowledge it with respect or to reject it with scorn.