national council, into a mere member of the Court, it must be
greatly changed from its original character.

In speaking of this body, I have my eye chiefly on the House of
Commons. I hope I shall be indulged in a few observations on the
nature and character of that assembly; not with regard to its LEGAL
FORM AND POWER, but to its SPIRIT, and to the purposes it is meant
to answer in the constitution.

The House of Commons was supposed originally to be NO PART OF THE
STANDING GOVERNMENT OF THIS COUNTRY. It was considered as a
control, issuing immediately from the people, and speedily to be
resolved into the mass from whence it arose. In this respect it was
in the higher part of Government what juries are in the lower. The
capacity of a magistrate being transitory, and that of a citizen
permanent, the latter capacity it was hoped would of course
preponderate in all discussions, not only between the people and the
standing authority of the Crown, but between the people and the
fleeting authority of the House of Commons itself. It was hoped
that, being of a middle nature between subject and Government, they
would feel with a more tender and a nearer interest everything that
concerned the people, than the other remoter and more permanent
parts of Legislature.

Whatever alterations time and the necessary accommodation of
business may have introduced, this character can never be sustained,
unless the House of Commons shall be made to bear some stamp of the
actual disposition of the people at large. It would (among public
misfortunes) be an evil more natural and tolerable, that the House
of Commons should be infected with every epidemical frenzy of the