To investigate and classify the causes of so great a change would require far more thought, and far more space, than we at present have to bestow.  But some of them are obvious.  During the contest which the Parliament carried on against the Stuarts, it had only to cheek and complain.  It has since had to govern.  As an attacking body, it could select its points of attack, and it naturally chose those on which it was likely to receive public support.  As a ruling body, it has neither the same liberty of choice, nor the same motives to gratify the people.  With the power of an executive government, it has drawn to itself some of the vices, and all the unpopularity of an executive government.  On the House of Commons above all, possessed as it is of the public purse, and consequently of the public sword, the nation throws all the blame of an ill-conducted war, of a blundering negotiation, of a disgraceful treaty, of an embarrassing commercial crisis.  The delays of the Court of Chancery, the misconduct of a judge at Van Diemen’s Land, any thing, in short, which in any part of the administration any person feels as a grievance, is attributed to the tyranny, or at least to the negligence, of that all-powerful body.  Private individuals pester it with their wrongs and claims.  A merchant appeals to it from the Courts of Rio Janeiro or St. Petersburg.  A historical painter complains to it that his department of art finds no encouragement.  Anciently the Parliament resembled a member of opposition, from whom no places are expected, who is not expected to confer favours and propose measures, but merely to watch and censure, and who may, therefore, unless he is grossly injudicious, be popular with the great body of the community.  The Parliament now resembles the same person put into office, surrounded by petitioners whom twenty times his patronage would not satisfy, stunned with complaints, buried in memorials, compelled by the duties of his station to bring forward measures similar to those which he was formerly accustomed to observe and to check, and perpetually encountered by objections similar to those which it was formerly his business to raise.

Perhaps it may be laid down as a general rule that a legislative assembly, not constituted on democratical principles, cannot be popular long after it ceases to be weak.  Its zeal for what the people, rightly or wrongly, conceive to be their interests, its sympathy with their mutable and violent passions, are merely the effects of the particular circumstances in which it is placed.  As long as it depends for existence on the public favour, it will employ all the means in its power to conciliate that favour.  While this is the case, defects in its constitution are of little consequence.  But, as the close union of such a body with the nation is the effect of an identity of interests not essential but accidental, it is in some measure dissolved from the time at which the danger which produced it ceases to exist.