privileges of the Commons, he was endeavouring to set up an iniquitously unconstitutional doctrine. The design of this was clearly as unconstitutional as anything done in the Star Chamber. It is to be said that the Commons had been guilty of the same kind of offence against the laws in 1770, when they deliberately constituted themselves a court of justice, and tried Wilkes for his libel on Lord Weymouth, who was not a member of their House. The two cases were made still further to resemble one another by the fact that the Government had in the first instance brought Wilkes's libel forward as a breach of privilege, intending the Commons to decide in a matter affecting the privilege of the Lords, just as the King now thought it proper for the Lords to defend the privileges of the Commons.1

In the printers' matter, however, the Commons thought that their own shoulders were broad enough to bear any odium which a salutary measure might occasion in the minds of the vulgar-of the people, that is, whom they were supposed to represent. So the Lord Mayor and Alderman Oliver were sent to the Tower, where they lay until the prorogation of Parliament. Wilkes refused to pay any attention to repeated summonses to attend at the bar of the House, very

1 See Massey's History of England, i. 273. (second ed.)

properly insisting that he ought to be summoned to attend in his place as member for Middlesex.' Besides committing Crosby and Oliver to the Tower, the House summoned the Lord Mayor's clerk to attend with his books, and then and there forced him to strike out the record of the recognisances into which their messenger had entered on being committed at the Mansion House. No Stuart ever did anything more arbitrary and illegal. The House deliberately intended to constitute itself, as Burke had said two years before, an arbitrary and despotic assembly. "The distempers of monarchy were the great subjects of apprehension and redress in the last century. In this, the distempers of Parliament."

So monstrous an interference with the records of an independent court, however, was only an incident in a

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1 In Sir T. May's otherwise excellent account of these transactions (Constitutional Hist. i. 427), he never mentions Wilkes without some evil epithet. He is a dexterous and cunning agitator." The collision between the City and the House was mostly brought about by his "artful contrivances." His letter to the Speaker, declining to attend, was of a piece with his "usual effrontery." Now, even supposing Wilkes to have been rightfully deprived of his seat, and Sir T. May assuredly does not suppose this, Wilkes at least did not think so, and I don't see any effrontery in the fact of his refusing to allow by implication that he was not at this time the legal member for Middlesex. Very likely Wilkes was a bad man, but then bad men constantly do good things, and in a good way.

memorable struggle. It is an important illustration of the temper of the majority, but the significance of the contest lay in the violent repugnance of that majority to anything like the publication of their proceedings. Many years before this, Pulteney had declared that the publication of debates looked very like making them accountable without doors for what they said within, and this was exactly the issue in the present transactions. The majority of the House were as unwilling to admit their strict constitutional responsibility to the public as the Roman Senate or the Great Council. Their position was, on the whole, very much that of the King himself. I have already, at the beginning of the chapter, suggested reasons why this imitation was inevitable, or at least natural.

In one portion of the proceedings relative to the Middlesex election, Privilege and Prerogative had ominously stood side by side. When the London and Westminster petition, praying for a dissolution, and denouncing the arbitrary incapacitation of Wilkes, was presented to the King, a motion was passed in the House that the allegations in the Remonstrance were unwarrantable, tending to destroy the allegiance of the subject, by withdrawing him from obedience to the laws (March, 1770). The Remonstrants had boldly,

and not more boldly than truly, set forth that "there is a time when it is morally demonstrable that men cease to be representatives. That time is now arrived. The House of Commons do not represent the people."

Lord Chatham, in his place in the House of Lords, had declared the same thing. "The Commons," he said, "have betrayed their constituents, and violated the constitution." "What is this mysterious power," he went on to ask, "undefined by law, unknown to the subject, which we must not approach without awe, nor speak of without reverence-which no man may question, and to which all men must submit? My Lords, I thought the slavish doctrine of passive obedience had long since been exploded; and when our kings were obliged to confess that their title to the crown and the rule of their government had no other foundation than the known laws of the land, I never expected to hear a Divine right or a Divine infallibility attributed to any other branch of the legislature." But the pretensions of the Lower House were nothing less than this. In some respects they were even more than royal. In 1774, for instance, a libel on the Speaker appeared in the Public Advertiser. It was properly suggested that Sir Fletcher Norton should be left to the remedy of a lawsuit. 'What,"

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cried Charles Fox, then, as even in 1782, a staunch upholder of Privilege, “was any member, much less the Speaker, to be grossly assailed and left to a lawsuit for a remedy? It would be no less absurd for the House to appeal to an inferior court, than for the Court of King's Bench to apply for protection to the Court of Common Pleas." Did Fox remember that the sovereign himself is obliged thus to appeal to an inferior court? Still the bulk of the members, in these bad times, as on many previous occasions,1 and on some since, could not divest themselves of the idea that the House is a court of law. The mischief flowing from such a doctrine is very obvious. The public liberties were in as much peril from these arbitrary assumptions of an oligarchic chamber, as they had ever been in from the arbitrary assumptions of an unconstitutional sovereign. Traditions of the supreme authority of the Lower House were rapidly crystallising into a form that was wholly incompatible with anything like free government.

As is usual when the minds of those in power have been infected with this arbitrary temper, the employment of military force to repress civil disturbances became a familiar and favourite idea. The military,

1 See Hallam's Constitutional History, c. xvi. sect. iii.

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