shall be set to the freedom of that choice?  Their right is prior to ours:  we all originate there.  They are the mortal enemies of the House of Commons who would persuade them to think or to act as if they were a self-originated magistracy, independent of the people, and unconnected with their opinions and feelings.  Under a pretence of exalting the dignity, they undermine the very foundations of this House.  When the question is asked here, What disturbs the people? whence all this clamor? we apply to the Treasury bench, and they tell us it is from the efforts of libellers, and the wickedness of the people:  a worn-out ministerial pretence.  If abroad the people are deceived by popular, within we are deluded by ministerial cant.

The question amounts to this:  Whether you mean to be a legal tribunal, or an arbitrary and despotic assembly?  I see and I feel the delicacy and difficulty of the ground upon which we stand in this question.  I could wish, indeed, that they who advise the crown had not left Parliament in this very ungraceful distress, in which they can neither retract with dignity nor persist with justice.  Another Parliament might have satisfied the people without lowering themselves.  But our situation is not in our own choice:  our conduct in that situation is all that is in our own option.  The substance of the question is, to put bounds to your own power by the rules and principles of law.  This is, I am sensible, a difficult thing to the corrupt, grasping, and ambitious part of human nature.  But the very difficulty argues and enforces the necessity of it.  First, because the greater the power, the more dangerous the abuse.  Since the Revolution, at least, the power of the nation has all flowed with a full tide into the House of Commons.  Secondly, because the House of Commons, as it is the most powerful, is the most corruptible part of the whole Constitution.  Our public wounds cannot be concealed; to be cured, they must be laid open.  The public does think we are a corrupt body.  In our legislative capacity, we are, in most instances, esteemed a very wise body; in our judicial, we have no credit, no character at all.  Our judgments stink in the nostrils of the people.  They think us to be not only without virtue, but without shame.  Therefore the greatness of our power, and the great and just opinion of our corruptibility and our corruption, render it necessary to fix some bound, to plant some landmark, which we are never to exceed.  This is what the bill proposes.

First, on this head, I lay it down as a fundamental rule in the law and Constitution of this country, that this House has not by itself alone a legislative authority in any case whatsoever.  I know that the contrary was the doctrine of the usurping House of Commons, which threw down the fences and bulwarks of law, which annihilated first the lords, then the crown, then its constituents.  But the first thing that was done on the restoration of the Constitution