XII.-MR. FOX ON THE ADDRESS.

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In opposing a ministerial echo of this speech, I expected, and I know it has been expected by many others, to hear on this occasion his Majesty declare from the throne, that he had been deceived and imposed upon by misinformation and misrepresentation; that in consequence of his delusion, the Parliament had been deluded; but that now the delusion was at an end; and requesting of his Parliament to devise the most speedy and efficacious means of putting an end to the public calamities; instead of which they had heard a speech breathing little else than vengeance, misery, and blood. Those who are ignorant of the personal character of the sovereign, and who imagine this speech to originate with him, may be led to suppose that he was an unfeeling despot, rejoicing in the horrid sacrifice of the liberty and lives of his subjects, who, when all hope of victory was vanished, still thirsted for revenge. ministers who advised this speech I affirm to be a curse to the country, over the affairs of which they have too long been suffered to preside. From that unrivalled preeminence which we so lately possessed, they have made us the object of ridicule and scorn to the surrounding nations. The noble lord in the blue ribbon has indeed thought fit to ascribe the American war and all its attendant calamities to the speeches of Opposition. Oh! wretched and incapable minister, whose measures are framed with so little foresight, and executed with so little firmness, that because a rash and intemperate invective is uttered against them in the House of Commons, they shall instantly crumble in pieces, and bring down ruin upon the country! Miserable statesman! to allow for no contingencies of fortune, no ebullition of passion, no collision of sentiment! Can he expect the concurrence of every individual in this House? and is he so weak or wicked, as to contrive plans of government of such a texture, that the intervention of circumstances, obvious and unavoidable, will occasion their total failure, and hazard the existence of the empire? Ministers must expect to hear of the calamities in which they have involved the empire,

again and again-not merely in this House, but as I trust at the tribunal of justice; for the time will surely come, when an oppressed and irritated people will firmly call for signal punishment on those whose counsels have brought the nation so near to the brink of destruction. An indignant nation will surely in the end compel them to make some faint atonement for the magnitude of their offences on a public scaffold.

XIV.-MR. PITT ON PARLIAMENTARY REFORM.

THE representation of the Commons in Parliament is a matter so truly interesting, that it has at all times excited the regard of the most enlightened; and the defects which they have found in that representation have given them reason to apprehend the most alarming consequences to the Constitution. It will be needless for me in the present moment to recal to the memory of the House the many occasions upon which I and others, in an anxious struggle with a minister who laboured to exert the corrupt influence of the crown in support of an inadequate representation of the people, maintained the necessity that there was for a calm revision of the principles of the Constitution, and a moderate reform of such defects as had imperceptibly and gradually stole in to deface, and which threatened at last totally to destroy, the most beautiful fabric of government in the world. Upon these occasions, we were unsuccessful in our efforts, on account of that corrupt influence of which I have spoken; but at last, I thank God, the voice of the people has happily prevailed, and we are now blessed with a ministry, whose wishes go along with those of the people for a moderate reform of the errors which have intruded themselves into the Constitution; and I am happy to see there is a spirit of unanimity prevalent in every part of the kingdom, and also in every part of that House, which makes the present day the fittest for undertaking this great task. The ministers have declared their virtuous resolution of supporting the king's government by means more honourable

as well as more permanent than corruption; and the nation has confidence in the declarations of men who have so invariably proved themselves the friends of freedom, and the animated supporters of an equal and fair system of representation. That the frame of our Constitution has undergone material alterations, by which the Commons House of Parliament has received an improper and dangerous bias, and by which indeed it has fallen so greatly from that direction and effect which it was intended and ought to have in the Constitution, I believe it would be idle for me to attempt to prove. It is a fact so plain and palpable, that every man's reason, if not his experience, must point it out to him. I have only to examine the quality and nature of that branch of the Constitution as originally established, and compare it with its present state and condition. The beautiful frame of government which has made us the envy and admiration of mankind, in which the people are entitled to hold so distinguished a share, is so far dwindled and departed from its original purity, that the representatives cease, in a great degree, to be connected with the people. It is the essence of the Constitution that the people should have a share in the government by the means of representation; and its excellence and permanency is calculated to consist in this representation having been designed to be equal, easy, practicable, and complete. When it ceases to be so, when the representative ceases to have connection with the constituent, and is either dependent on the crown or the aristocracy, there is a defect in the frame of representation, and it is not innovation, but recovery of Constitution, to repair it.

The influence of the Treasury in some boroughs is contested, not by the electors of those boroughs, but by some one or other powerful man who assumes, or pretends to, an hereditary property of what ought only to be the rights and privileges of the electors. The interests of the Treasury are considered as well as the interests of the great man, the lord or the commoner, who has connection with the borough; but the interests of the people, the rights of the electors, are the only things that are never

attended to, or taken into the account. Will any man say, that in this case there is the most distant idea or principle of representation? There were other boroughs. which have now in fact no actual existence, but in the return of members of the House. They have no existence in property, in population, in trade, in weight. There are hardly any men in the borough who have a right to vote; and they are the slaves and subjects of a person who claims the property of the borough, and who in fact makes the return. This also is no representation, nor any thing like it. Another set of boroughs and towns, in the lofty possession of English freedom, claim to themselves the right of bringing their votes to market. They have no other market, no other property, and no other stake in the country, than the property and price which they procure for their votes. Such boroughs are the most dangerous of all others. So far from consulting the interests of the country in the choice they make, they hold out their borough to the best purchaser; and in fact they belong more to the nabob of Arcot, than they do to the people of Great Britain. They are cities and boroughs more within the jurisdiction of the Carnatic than the limits of the empire of Great Britain; and it is a fact pretty well known and generally understood, that the nabob of Arcot has no less than seven or eight members in this House. Such boroughs, then, are the sources of corruption: they give rise to an inundation of corrupt wealth and corrupt members, who have no regard nor connection either for or with the people of this kingdom. It has always been considered, in all nations, as the greatest source of danger to a kingdom, when a foreign influence is suffered to creep into the national councils.

XIV.—MR. CANNING ON POLITICAL SCIENCE. I Do verily and sincerely believe, that there is no proposition more false than that the influence of the Crown, any more than its direct power, has increased comparatively with the increasing strength, wealth, and population

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of the country. To these, if the Crown be good for anything at all in the Constitution, it is necessary that its power and influence should bear some reasonable proportion. I deny that in the House of Commons,-I deny that in the House of Lords, such an increase can be shown; but further I contend, that, in speculating upon the practical play of our Constitution, we narrow our view of its efficient principles, of its progress, and of the state in which it now stands, if we do not take into account other powers, extrinsic to the two houses of parliament, which are at work in the moral and political world, and which require to be balanced and counterpoised in their operation. What should we think of that philosopher, who, in writing, at the present day, a treatise upon naval architecture and the theory of navigation, should omit wholly from his calculation that new and mighty power,-new, at least, in the application of its might, which walks the water, like a giant rejoicing in his course; stemming alike the tempest and the tide ;accelerating intercourse, shortening distances;-creating, as it were, unexpected neighbourhoods, and new combinations of social and commercial relation;-and giving to the fickleness of winds, and the faithlessness of waves the certainty and steadiness of a highway upon the land? Such a writer, though he might describe a ship correctly; though he might show from what quarters the winds of heaven blow, would be surely an incurious and an idle spectator of the progress of nautical science, who did not see in the power of steam a corrective of all former calculations. So, in political science, he who, speculating on the British Constitution, should content himself with marking the distribution of acknowledged technical, powers between the House of Lords, the House of Commons, and the Crown, and assigning to each their separate provinces,-to the Lords their legislative authority, to the Crown its veto (how often used?)—to the House of Commons its power of stopping supplies (how often, in fact, necessary to be resorted to ?)—and should think that he had thus described the British Constitution as it acts and as it is influenced in its action; but should