in duty and conscience bound to take care of their interests."

Lord Mansfield's doctrine of a virtual representation of the Colonies
must be admitted to be overstrained. The analogy between the case of
colonists in a country from no part of which representatives are sent to
Parliament, and that of a borough or county where some classes of the
population which may, in a sense, be regarded as spokesmen or agents of
the rest form a constituency and return members, must be allowed to
fail; yet the last sentences of this extract are worth preserving, as
laying down the important constitutional principle, subsequently
expanded and enforced with irresistible learning and power of argument
by Burke, that a member of the House of Commons is not a delegate,
bound, under all circumstances, to follow the opinions or submit to the
dictation of his constituents, but that from the moment of his election
he is a councillor of the whole kingdom, bound to exercise an
independent judgment for the interests of the whole people, rather than
to guide himself by the capricious or partial judgments of a small
section of it. But in its more immediate objects--that of establishing
the two principles, that the constitution knows of no limitation to the
authority of Parliament, and of no distinction between the power of
taxation and that of any other kind of legislation--Lord Mansfield's
speech is now universally admitted to have been unanswerable.[38]

The abstract right was unquestionably on the side of the minister and
the Parliament who had imposed the tax. But he is not worthy of the name
of statesman who conceives absolute rights and metaphysical distinctions
to be the proper foundation for measures of government, and pays no
regard to custom, to precedent, to the habits and feelings of the people
to be governed; who, disregarding the old and most true adage, _summum
jus summa injuria_, omits to take into his calculations the expediency