Nothing of this.  The silence of these writers is dreadfully expressive.  They dare not touch the subject.  But it is not annihilated by their silence, nor by our indifference.  It is but too plain that our Constitution cannot exist with such a communication.  Our humanity, our manners, our morals, our religion, cannot stand with such a communication.  The Constitution is made by those things, and for those things:  without them it cannot exist; and without them it is no matter whether it exists or not.

It was an ingenious Parliamentary Christmas play, by which, in both Houses, you anticipated the holidays; it was a relaxation from your graver employment; it was a pleasant discussion you had, which part of the family of the Constitution was the elder branch,—­whether one part did not exist prior to the others, and whether it might exist and flourish, if “the others were cast into the fire."[12] In order to make this Saturnalian amusement general in the family, you sent it down stairs, that judges and juries might partake of the entertainment.  The unfortunate antiquary and augur who is the butt of all this sport may suffer in the roistering horse-play and practical jokes of the servants’ hall.  But whatever may become of him, the discussion itself, and the timing it, put me in mind of what I have read, (where I do not recollect,) that the subtle nation of the Greeks were busily employed, in the Church of Santa Sophia, in a dispute of mixed natural philosophy, metaphysics, and theology, whether the light on Mount Tabor was created or uncreated, and were ready to massacre the holders of the unfashionable opinion, at the very moment when the ferocious enemy of all philosophy and religion, Mahomet the Second, entered through a breach into the capital of the Christian world.  I may possibly suffer much more than Mr. Reeves (I shall certainly give much more general offence) for breaking in upon this constitutional amusement concerning the created or uncreated nature of the two Houses of Parliament, and by calling their attention to a problem which may entertain them less, but which concerns them a great deal more,—­that is, whether, with this Gallic Jacobin fraternity, which they are desired by some writers to court, all the parts of the government, about whose combustible or incombustible qualities they are contending, may “not be cast into the fire” together.  He is a strange visionary (but he is nothing worse) who fancies that any one part of our Constitution, whatever right of primogeniture it may claim, or whatever astrologers may divine from its horoscope, can possibly survive the others.  As they have lived, so they will die, together.  I must do justice to the impartiality of the Jacobins.  I have not observed amongst them the least predilection for any of those parts.  If there has been any difference in their malice, I think they have shown a worse disposition to the House of Commons than to the crown.  As to the House of Lords, they do not speculate at all about it, and for reasons that are too obvious to detail.