SPEECH ON REFORM OF REPRESENTATION IN THE HOUSE OF COMMONS
June, 1784



Mr. Speaker,--We have now discovered, at the close of the eighteenth
century, that the Constitution of England, which for a series of
ages had been the proud distinction of this country, always the
admiration, and sometimes the envy, of the wise and learned in every
other nation--we have discovered that this boasted Constitution, in
the most boasted part of it, is a gross imposition upon the
understanding of mankind, an insult to their feelings, and acting by
contrivances destructive to the best and most valuable interests of
the people. Our political architects have taken a survey of the
fabric of the British Constitution. It is singular that they report
nothing against the Crown, nothing against the Lords; but in the
House of Commons everything is unsound; it is ruinous in every part.
It is infested by the dry rot, and ready to tumble about our ears
without their immediate help. You know by the faults they find what
are their ideas of the alteration. As all government stands upon
opinion, they know that the way utterly to destroy it is to remove
that opinion, to take away all reverence, all confidence from it;
and then, at the first blast of public discontent and popular
tumult, it tumbles to the ground.

In considering this question, they who oppose it, oppose it on
different grounds; one is in the nature of a previous question--that
some alterations may be expedient, but that this is not the time for