concern?  It would be a step equally odious and unnecessary.  Shall the Lords be called upon to determine the rights and privileges of the Commons?  They cannot do it without a flagrant breach of the constitution.  Or will you refer it to the judges?  They have often told your ancestors that the law of parliament is above them.  What part then remains but to leave it to the people to determine for themselves?  They alone are injured, and since there is no superior power to which the cause can be referred, they alone ought to determine.

I do not mean to perplex you with a tedious argument upon a subject already so discussed that inspiration could hardly throw a new light upon it.  There are, however, two points of view in which it particularly imports your Majesty to consider the late proceedings of the House of Commons.  By depriving a subject of his birthright they have attributed to their own vote an authority equal to an act of the whole legislature, and, though perhaps not with the same motives, have strictly followed the example of the Long Parliament, which first declared the regal office useless, and soon after, with as little ceremony, dissolved the House of Lords.  The same pretended power which robs an English subject of his birthright may rob an English king of his crown.  In another view, the resolution of the House of Commons, apparently not so dangerous to your Majesty, is still more alarming to your people.  Not contented with divesting one man of his right, they have arbitrarily conveyed that right to another.  They have set aside a return as illegal, without daring to censure those officers who were particularly apprised of Mr. Wilkes’ incapacity, not only by the declaration of the House, but expressly by the writ directed to them, and who, nevertheless, returned him as duly elected.  They have rejected the majority of votes, the only criterion by which our laws judge of the sense of the people; they have transferred the right of election from the collective to the representative body; and by these acts, taken separately or together, they have essentially altered the original constitution of the House of Commons.  Versed as your Majesty undoubtedly is in the English history, it cannot escape you how much it is your interest as well as your duty to prevent one of the three estates from encroaching upon the province of the other two, or assuming the authority of them all.  When once they have departed from the great constitutional line by which all their proceedings should be directed, who will answer for their future moderation?  Or what assurance will they give you that, when they have trampled upon their equals, they will submit to a superior?  Your Majesty may learn hereafter how nearly the slave and tyrant are allied.

Some of your council, more candid than the rest, admit the abandoned profligacy of the present House of Commons, but oppose their dissolution, upon an opinion, I confess, not very unwarrantable, that their successors would be equally at the disposal of the treasury.  I cannot persuade myself that the nation will have profited so little by experience.  But if that opinion were well founded, you might then gratify our wishes at an easy rate, and appease the present clamour against your government, without offering any material injury to the favourite cause of corruption.