lly served by any man.
It is out of the nature of men and things that they should; and their
presumption will be equal to their folly if they expect it. The power of
the people, within the laws, must show itself sufficient to protect
every representative in the animated performance of his duty, or that
duty cannot be performed. The House of Commons can never be a control on
other parts of government, unless they are controlled themselves by
their constituents; and unless those 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 of having no _appeal_ from their
jurisdiction is made to imply that they have no _rule_ in the exercise
of it: the judgment does not derive its validity from its conformity to
the law; but preposterously the law is made to attend on the judgment;
and the rule of the judgment is no other than the