the slightest encroachment by the Crown, by the Government, or by
any humbler part of the executive, was fiercely resented; and to this
resentment some of the greatest and most memorable crises in the long
fight for English liberty are due. But rarely had there been a
more flagrant, never a more wanton, infringement of the hardly-won
privileges of the House of Commons. Had Lord Cochrane been detected
and seized violently in some out-of-the-way hiding-place, the
over-zealous servants of the Crown would have had some excuse for
their conduct. But in appearing publicly in the House, he showed to
all the world that he was no runaway from justice, that he was willing
to submit to its honest administration by honest hands, that all he
sought was a fair hearing and a fair judgment upon his case, and that,
believing it impossible to obtain that through the elaborate machinery
of oppression which then went by the name of administration
of justice, he now only asserted his right, the right of every
Englishman, and especially the right of a Member of Parliament, to
appeal from the agents of the law to the makers of the law, to call
upon the legislators of his country to see whether he had not been
wrongfully used by the men who, though practically too much their
masters, were in theory only their servants.

"I did not go to the House of Commons," he said, "to complain about
losses or sufferings, about fine or imprisonment; or of property, to
the amount of ten times the fine, of which I had been cheated by this
malicious prosecution. I did not go to the House to complain of
the mockery of having been heard in my defence, and answered by a
reference to the decision from which that defence was an appeal. I did
not go there to complain of those who expelled me from my profession.
I did not go to the House to complain _generally_ of the advisers of
the Crown. But I went there to complain of the conduct of him who has