of government against any untried project, that a nation has long existed and flourished under it.  It is a better presumption even of the choice of a nation,—­far better than any sudden and temporary arrangement by actual election.  Because a nation is not an idea only of local extent and individual momentary aggregation, but it is an idea of continuity which extends in time as well as in numbers and in space.  And this is a choice not of one day or one set of people, not a tumultuary and giddy choice; it is a deliberate election of ages and of generations; it is a constitution, made by what is ten thousand times better than choice; it is made by the peculiar circumstances, occasions, tempers, dispositions, and moral, civil, and social habitudes of the people, which, disclose themselves only in a long space of time.  It is a vestment which accommodates itself to the body.  Nor is prescription of government formed upon blind, unmeaning prejudices.  For man is a most unwise and a most wise being.  The individual is foolish; the multitude, for the moment, is foolish, when they act without deliberation; but the species is wise, and, when time is given to it, as a species, it almost always acts right.

The reason for the crown as it is, for the lords as they are, is my reason for the commons as they are, the electors as they are.  Now if the crown, and the lords, and the judicatures are all prescriptive, so is the House of Commons of the very same origin, and of no other.  We and our electors have their powers and privileges both made and circumscribed by prescription, as much to the full as the other parts; and as such we have always claimed them, and on no other title.  The House of Commons is a legislative body corporate by prescription, not made upon any given theory, but existing prescriptively,—­just like the rest.  This proscription has made it essentially what it is, an aggregate collection of three parts, knights, citizens, burgesses.  The question is, whether this has been always so, since the House of Commons has taken its present shape and circumstances, and has been an essential operative part of the Constitution,—­which, I take it, it has been for at least five hundred years.

This I resolve to myself in the affirmative:  and then another question arises:—­Whether this House stands firm upon its ancient foundations, and is not, by time and accidents, so declined from its perpendicular as to want the hand of the wise and experienced architects of the day to set it upright again, and to prop and buttress it up for duration;—­whether it continues true to the principles upon which it has hitherto stood;—­whether this be de facto the constitution of the House of Commons, as it has been since the time that the House of Commons has without dispute become a necessary and an efficient part of the British Constitution.  To ask whether a thing which has always been the same stands to its usual principle seems to me to be perfectly absurd: