arises from a total ignorance of the bounds between civil and criminal
jurisdiction, and of the separate maxims that govern these two
provinces of law, that are eternally separate. Undoubtedly the courts of
law, where a new case comes before them, as they do every hour, then,
that there may be no defect in justice, call in similar principles, and
the example of the nearest determination, and do everything to draw the
law to as near a conformity to general equity and right reason as they
can bring it with its being a fixed principle. _Boni judicis est
ampliare justitiam_,--that is, to make open and liberal justice. But in
criminal matters this parity of reason and these analogies ever have
been and ever ought to be shunned.

Whatever is incident to a court of judicature is necessary to the House
of Commons as judging in elections. But a power of making incapacities
is not necessary to a court of judicature: therefore a power of making
incapacities is not necessary to the House of Commons.

Incapacity, declared by whatever authority, stands upon two principles:
first, an incapacity arising from the supposed incongruity of two duties
in the commonwealth; secondly, an incapacity arising from unfitness by
infirmity of nature or the criminality of conduct. As to the first class
of incapacities, they have no _hardship_ annexed to them. The persons so
incapacitated are paid by one dignity for what they abandon in another,
and for the most part the situation arises from their own choice. But as
to the second, arising from an unfitness not fixed by Nature, but
superinduced by some positive acts, or arising from honorable motives,
such as an occasional personal disability, of all things it ought to be
defined by the fixed rule of law, what Lord Coke calls the golden
metwand of the law, and not by the crooked cord of discretion. Whatever
is general is better borne. We take our common lot with men of the same