convertible terms? And if incapacity is voted to be inherent in
expulsion, if expulsion be arbitrary, incapacity is arbitrary also. I
have therefore shown that the power of incapacitation is a legislative
power; I have shown that legislative power does not belong to the House
of Commons; and therefore it follows that the House of Commons has not a
power of incapacitation.

I know not the origin of the House of Commons, but am very sure that it
did not create itself; the electors were prior to the elected, whose
rights originated either from the people at large, or from some other
form of legislature, which never could intend for the chosen a power of
superseding the choosers.

If you have not a power of declaring an incapacity simply by the mere
act of declaring it, it is evident to the most ordinary reason you
cannot have a right of expulsion, inferring, or rather including, an
incapacity. For as the law, when it gives any direct right, gives also
as necessary incidents all the means of acquiring the possession of that
right, so, where it does not give a right directly, it refuses all the
means by which such a right may by any mediums be exercised, or in
effect be indirectly acquired. Else it is very obvious that the
intention of the law in refusing that right might be entirely
frustrated, and the whole power of the legislature baffled. If there be
no certain, invariable rule of eligibility, it were better to get
simplicity, if certainty is not to be had, and to resolve all the
franchises of the subject into this one short proposition,--the will and
pleasure of the House of Commons.

The argument drawn from the courts of law applying the principles of law
to new cases as they emerge is altogether frivolous, inapplicable, and