rulers, and the misery and despair which their iniquitous laws entailed.

It was not only in the splendid pamphlet on the Present Discontents that Burke showed his keen appreciation of the true character of the struggle between Wilkes and the House of Commons. He put the case still more plainly in a speech delivered in his place in 1771. "The question amounts to this," he told the House: "whether you mean to be a legal tribunal, or an arbitrary and despotic assembly." The issue was indeed nothing less than this. It was the second of those three revolutionary questions which, as I have said, resume the constitutional history of England from the accession of George III. to the outbreak of the French Revolution. "They are the mortal enemies of the House of Commons," Burke exclaimed, "who would persuade them to think or to act as if they were a self-originated magistracy, independent of the people, and unconnected with their opinions and feelings." But these mortal enemies of its very constitution were at this time the majority of the House. It was to no purpose that Burke argued with more than legal closeness that incapacitation could not be a power according to law, inasmuch as it had neither of the two properties of law it was not known, "you yourselves

not knowing upon what grounds you will vote the incapacity of any man;" and it was not fixed, because it was varied according to the occasion, exercised according to discretion, and no man could call for it as a right. A strain of unanswerable reasoning of this kind counted for nothing, in spite of its being unanswerable. Despotic or oligarchic pretensions are always proof against the most formidable battery that reason and experience can construct against them.1 And Wilkes's exclusion endured until this Parliamentthe Unreported Parliament, as it was called, and in many respects the very worst that ever assembled at Westminster-was dissolved, and a new one elected (1774), when he was once again returned for Middlesex, and took his seat.

The conduct of one of the sheriffs may serve to illustrate the just and righteous strength of feeling which prevailed on Wilkes's exclusion. Sheriff Townshend was member for the borough of Calne, and in February, 1770, in Committee of Ways and Means, he protested against the House granting the land tax for

1 Pitt, writing to his mother in 1780, talks of a debate in the House of Commons, "where, according to the old custom, which is, I fear, pretty nearly re-established, arguments and numbers were almost equally clear on opposite sides."-Earl Stanhope's Life, i. 40.

the county of Middlesex.

The freeholders of that

county, he said, by their election, "signed indentures to Mr. Wilkes, giving and granting to him the power of levying taxes upon them. They say Mr. Wilkes, our lawful representative, is kept out of this House by force and violence; the House itself has set up another candidate in opposition to him, and in so doing has proceeded contrary to the law of the land. Mr. Luttrell is not the representative of the county of Middlesex." The speaker went on to say that he for one would not pay the land tax so levied, and he did his best to keep his word.1 In November of the same year he was distrained upon for two hundred pounds. He instituted proceedings against the collector, and the trial came off in the King's Bench, before Lord Mansfield. The jury were told that the question was whether there was any legislative power in the county; if so, then they ought to find for the tax-gatherer. Of course the patriotic sheriff was cast. Nothing came of his resistance, but in its spirit it is hard to see why it was less laudable than Hampden's contest against Ship-money, or than Hancock's audacity in having the Boston Custom-house officer locked up in

1 Cavendish Debates, i. 442, with Mr. J. Wright's note.

the cabin of the Liberty. The King could never understand the prolonged fuss that was made about the Middlesex election. "Nothing can be a greater proof of a want of grievances," he wrote in 1773, "when so trite an affair as the Middlesex election can be hashed up every Session." 1 His zeal for the most beautiful combination ever devised by man, as he called the British Constitution, was not wholly according to knowledge.

In the same Parliament there was another and scarcely less remarkable case of Privilege, "that eldest son of Prerogative," as Burke truly called it, "and inheriting all the vices of its parent." Certain printers were accused of breach of privilege for reporting the debates of the House (March, 1771). The messenger of the serjeant-at-arms attempted to take one of them into custody in his own shop in the City. A constable was standing by, designedly, it has been supposed, and Miller, the printer, gave the messenger into his custody for an assault. The case came on before the Lord Mayor, Alderman Wilkes, and Alderman Oliver, the same evening, and the result was that the messenger of the House was committed. The City doctrine was, that

1 Corr. with Lord North, i. 131. Also at p. 233 (1775), he hopes they have done with that "old bone of contention."

if the House of Commons had a serjeant-at-arms, they had a serjeant-at-mace. If the House of Commons could send their citizens to Newgate, they could send its messenger to the Compter. Two other printers were collusively arrested, brought before Wilkes and Oliver, and at once liberated. The King has had some credit given him for warning Lord North to use every caution to prevent this becoming a serious affair. After all, the most stupid and pragmatic of beadles generally learns by experience the wisdom of leaving certain sorts of people to themselves. But though the King desired Lord North to be cautious, he had no intention of letting the printers escape. "Is not the House of Lords, as a Court of Record," he asked, "the best court to bring such miscreants [the printers] before? as it can fine as well as imprison, and as the Lords have broader shoulders to support any odium that this salutary measure may occasion in the minds of the vulgar." By the vulgar, his Majesty as usual meant the bulk of the people of England; and by his proposal to make the House of Lords a universal court of first instance, for on no other theory could it take any cognisance of a complaint of a breach of the

1

1 Donne's Correspondence of George III. with Lord North, i. 57.