other parts of Government, unless they are controlled themselves by
their constituents; and unless these constituents possess some right
in the choice of that House, which it is not in the power of that
House to take away. If they suffer this power of arbitrary
incapacitation to stand, they have utterly perverted every other
power of the House of Commons. The late proceeding, I will not say,
IS contrary to law; it MUST be so; for the power which is claimed
cannot, by any possibility, be a legal power in any limited member
of Government.

The power which they claim, of declaring incapacities, would not be
above the just claims of a final judicature, if they had not laid it
down as a leading principle, that they had no rule in the exercise
of this claim but their own DISCRETION. Not one of their abettors
has ever undertaken to assign the principle of unfitness, the
species or degree of delinquency, on which the House of Commons will
expel, nor the mode of proceeding upon it, nor the evidence upon
which it is established. The direct consequence of which is, that
the first franchise of an Englishman, and that on which all the rest
vitally depend, is to be forfeited for some offence which no man
knows, and which is to be proved by no known rule whatsoever of
legal evidence. This is so anomalous to our whole constitution,
that I will venture to say, the most trivial right, which the
subject claims, never was, nor can be, forfeited in such a manner.

The whole of their usurpation is established upon this method of
arguing. We do not make laws. No; we do not contend for this
power. We only declare law; and, as we are a tribunal both
competent and supreme, what we declare to be law becomes law,
although it should not have been so before. Thus the circumstance