memorable struggle. It is an important illustration of the temper of the majority, but the significance of the contest lay in the violent repugnance of that majority to anything like the publication of their proceedings. Many years before this, Pulteney had declared that the publication of debates looked very like making them accountable without doors for what they said within, and this was exactly the issue in the present transactions. The majority of the House were as unwilling to admit their strict constitutional responsibility to the public as the Roman Senate or the Great Council. Their position was, on the whole, very much that of the King himself. I have already, at the beginning of the chapter, suggested reasons why this imitation was inevitable, or at least natural.

In one portion of the proceedings relative to the Middlesex election, Privilege and Prerogative had ominously stood side by side. When the London and Westminster petition, praying for a dissolution, and denouncing the arbitrary incapacitation of Wilkes, was presented to the King, a motion was passed in the House that the allegations in the Remonstrance were unwarrantable, tending to destroy the allegiance of the subject, by withdrawing him from obedience to the laws (March, 1770). The Remonstrants had boldly,

and not more boldly than truly, set forth that “there is a time when it is morally demonstrable that men cease to be representatives. That time is now arrived. The House of Commons do not represent the people."

Lord Chatham, in his place in the House of Lords, had declared the same thing. "The Commons," he said, “have betrayed their constituents, and violated the constitution." "What is this mysterious power," he went on to ask, "undefined by law, unknown to the subject, which we must not approach without awe, nor speak of without reverence-which no man may question, and to which all men must submit? My Lords, I thought the slavish doctrine of passive obedience had long since been exploded; and when our kings were obliged to confess that their title to the crown and the rule of their government had no other foundation than the known laws of the land, I never expected to hear a Divine right or a Divine infallibility attributed to any other branch of the legislature." But the pretensions of the Lower House were nothing less than this. In some respects they were even more than royal. In 1774, for instance, a libel on the Speaker appeared in the Public Advertiser. It was properly suggested that Sir Fletcher Norton. should be left to the remedy of a lawsuit. "What,"

cried Charles Fox, then, as even in 1782, a staunch upholder of Privilege, "was any member, much less the Speaker, to be grossly assailed and left to a lawsuit for a remedy? It would be no less absurd for the House to appeal to an inferior court, than for the Court of King's Bench to apply for protection to the Court of Common Pleas." Did Fox remember that the sovereign himself is obliged thus to appeal to an inferior court? Still the bulk of the members, in these bad times, as on many previous occasions,1 and on some since, could not divest themselves of the idea that the House is a court of law. The mischief flowing from such a doctrine is very obvious. public liberties were in as much peril from these arbitrary assumptions of an oligarchic chamber, as they had ever been in from the arbitrary assumptions of an unconstitutional sovereign. Traditions of the supreme authority of the Lower House were rapidly crystallising into a form that was wholly incompatible with anything like free government.

The

As is usual when the minds of those in power have been infected with this arbitrary temper, the employment of military force to repress civil disturbances became a familiar and favourite idea. The military,

1 See Hallam's Constitutional History, c. xvi. sect. iii.

H

said Lord Weymouth, in his famous letter to the Surrey magistrates, "can never be employed to a more constitutional purpose than in the support of the authority and dignity of the magistracy." If the magistrate should be menaced, "he is cautioned not to delay a moment in calling for the aid of the military, and making use of them effectually." Such an occasion "always presents itself when the civil power is trifled with and insulted." The consequence of this bloody scroll, as Wilkes rightly called it, was that shortly afterwards an affray occurred between the crowd and the troops, in which some twenty people were killed and wounded (May 10, 1768). Instead of keeping the military in the background until absolutely wanted, the magistrates, along with the soldiers, at once came upon the ground. The following day, the Secretary of War, Lord Barrington, wrote to the commanding officer, informing him that "his Majesty highly approves of the conduct both of officers and men, and means that his gracious approbation of them should be communicated to them by you." "I beg you will be pleased to assure them that every possible regard shall be shown to them. Their zeal and good behaviour on this occasion deserve it; and in case any disagreeable circumstance should happen in the execution of their duty, they

shall have every defence and protection that the law can authorise and that this office can give." This gracious approval of bloodshed, and encouraging invitation to shed more blood whenever an opportunity should offer, needs no comment. It is worth remembering as a set-off, when one hears people talking nonsense about King George's honesty and sincerity, just as if sincerity were any palliative in a ruler for folly, incompetence, and a savage's indifference to human life.1 Various other steps were taken to show that Lord Barrington had promised not a word more than he meant to perform.

Burke brought the matter before the House in a motion for a Committee of Inquiry, supported by one of the most lucid and able of his minor speeches. "If ever the time should come," he concluded, "when this House shall be found prompt to execute and slow to inquire; ready to punish the excesses of the people, and slow to listen to their grievances; ready to grant supplies, and slow to examine the account; ready to

1 The complacency with which he contemplated the time "when decrepitude or death should put an end to" Lord Chatham, is familiar. (Corr. with Lord North, i. 261). Yet, "I am not conscious of having much gall in my composition" (i. 71). There is a ghastly kind of quaintness in the ease with which he looks out for windfalls in the way of patronage, and expresses his conviction first that one and then another cannot "last long."