hard saying: that this House should have a general discretionary power
of disqualification is a dangerous saying. That the people should not
choose their own representative is a saying that shakes the
Constitution: that this House should name the representative is a saying
which, followed by practice, subverts the Constitution. They have the
right of electing; you have a right of expelling: they of choosing; you
of judging, and only of judging, of the choice. What bounds shall be set
to the freedom of that choice? Their right is prior to ours: we all
originate there. They are the mortal enemies of the House of Commons who
would persuade them to think or to act as if they were a self-originated
magistracy, independent of the people, and unconnected with their
opinions and feelings. Under a pretence of exalting the dignity, they
undermine the very foundations of this House. When the question is asked
_here_, What disturbs the people? whence all this clamor? we apply to
the Treasury bench, and they tell us it is from the efforts of
libellers, and the wickedness of the people: a worn-out ministerial
pretence. If abroad the people are deceived by popular, within we are
deluded by ministerial cant.

The question amounts to this: Whether you mean to be a legal tribunal,
or an arbitrary and despotic assembly? I see and I feel the delicacy and
difficulty of the ground upon which we stand in this question. I could
wish, indeed, that they who advise the crown had not left Parliament in
this very ungraceful distress, in which they can neither retract with
dignity nor persist with justice. Another Parliament might have
satisfied the people without lowering themselves. But our situation is
not in our own choice: our conduct in that situation is all that is in
our own option. The substance of the question is, to put bounds to your
own power by the rules and principles of law. This is, I am sensible, a
difficult thing to the corrupt, grasping, and ambitious part of human