encroaching prerogative--"Your sceptre has its length; you cannot
add a hair to your head, or a gem to your crown, but what an eternal
law has given to it." Here it says to an overweening peerage--"Your
pride finds banks that it cannot overflow;" here to a tumultuous and
giddy people--"There is a bound to the raging of the sea." Our
Constitution is like our island, which uses and restrains its
subject sea; in vain the waves roar. In that Constitution I know,
and exultingly I feel, both that I am free and that I am not free
dangerously to myself or to others. I know that no power on earth,
acting as I ought to do, can touch my life, my liberty, or my
property. I have that inward and dignified consciousness of my own
security and independence, which constitutes, and is the only thing
which does constitute, the proud and comfortable sentiment of
freedom in the human breast. I know, too, and I bless God for my
safe mediocrity; I know that if I possessed all the talents of the
gentlemen on the side of the House I sit, and on the other, I
cannot, by royal favour, or by popular delusion, or by oligarchical
cabal, elevate myself above a certain very limited point, so as to
endanger my own fall or the ruin of my country. I know there is an
order that keeps things fast in their place; it is made to us, and
we are made to it. Why not ask another wife, other children,
another body, another mind?

The great object of most of these reformers is to prepare the
destruction of the Constitution, by disgracing and discrediting the
House of Commons. For they think--prudently, in my opinion--that if
they can persuade the nation that the House of Commons is so
constituted as not to secure the public liberty; not to have a
proper connection with the public interests; so constituted as not,
either actually or virtually, to be the representative of the