It never can be otherwise.  A seat in this House, for good purposes, for bad purposes, for no purposes at all, (except the mere consideration derived from being concerned in the public counsels,) will ever be a first-rate object of ambition in England.  Ambition is no exact calculator.  Avarice itself does not calculate strictly, when it games.  One thing is certain,—­that in this political game the great lottery of power is that into which men will purchase with millions of chances against them.  In Turkey, where the place, where the fortune, where the head itself are so insecure that scarcely any have died in their beds for ages, so that the bowstring is the natural death of bashaws, yet in no country is power and distinction (precarious enough, God knows, in all) sought for with such boundless avidity,—­as if the value of place was enhanced by the danger and insecurity of its tenure.  Nothing will ever make a seat in this House not an object of desire to numbers by any means or at any charge, but the depriving it of all power and all dignity.  This would do it.  This is the true and only nostrum for that purpose.  But an House of Commons without power and without dignity, either in itself or in its members, is no House of Commons for the purposes of this Constitution.

But they will be afraid to act ill, if they know that the day of their account is always near.  I wish it were true; but it is not:  here again we have experience, and experience is against us.  The distemper of this age is a poverty of spirit and of genius:  it is trifling, it is futile, worse than ignorant, superficially taught, with the politics and morals of girls at a boarding-school rather than of men and statesmen:  but it is not yet desperately wicked, or so scandalously venal as in former times.  Did not a triennial Parliament give up the national dignity, approve the peace of Utrecht, and almost give up everything else, in taking every step to defeat the Protestant succession?  Was not the Constitution saved by those who had no election at all to go to, the Lords, because the court applied to electors, and by various means carried them from their true interests, so that the Tory ministry had a majority without an application to a single member?  Now as to the conduct of the members, it was then far from pure and independent.  Bribery was infinitely more flagrant.  A predecessor of yours, Mr. Speaker, put the question of his own expulsion for bribery.  Sir William Musgrave was a wise man, a grave man, an independent man, a man of good fortune and good family; however, he carried on, while in opposition, a traffic, a shameful traffic, with the ministry.  Bishop Burnet knew of six thousand pounds which he had received at one payment.  I believe the payment of sums in hard money, plain, naked bribery, is rare amongst us.  It was then far from uncommon.

A triennial was near ruining, a septennial Parliament saved your Constitution; nor, perhaps, have you ever known a more flourishing period, for the union of national prosperity, dignity, and liberty, than the sixty years you have passed under that constitution of Parliament.