_occasional will of
the House_. An arbitrary discretion leads, legality follows; which is
just the very nature and description of a legislative act.

This claim in their hands was no barren theory. It was pursued into its
utmost consequences; and a dangerous principle has begot a correspondent
practice. A systematic spirit has been shown upon both sides. The
electors of Middlesex chose a person whom the House of Commons had voted
incapable; and the House of Commons has taken in a member whom the
electors of Middlesex had not chosen. By a construction on that
legislative power which had been assumed, they declared that the true
legal sense of the country was contained in the minority, on that
occasion; and might, on a resistance to a vote of incapacity, be
contained in any minority.

When any construction of law goes against the spirit of the privilege it
was meant to support, it is a vicious construction. It is material to us
to be represented really and _bona fide_, and not in forms, in types,
and shadows, and fictions of law. The right of election was not
established merely as a _matter of form_, to satisfy some method and
rule of technical reasoning; it was not a principle which might
substitute a _Titius_ or a _Maevius_, a _John Doe_ or _Richard Roe_, in
the place of a man specially chosen; not a principle which was just as
well satisfied with one man as with another. It is a right, the effect
of which is to give to the people that man, and _that man only_, whom,
by their voices actually, not constructively given, they declare that
they know, esteem, love, and trust. This right is a matter within their
own power of judging and feeling; not an _ens rationis_ and creature of
law: nor can those devices, by which anything else is substituted in the
place of such an actual choice, answer in the least degree the end of
representation.

I know that the courts of law have made as strained constructions in
other cases. Such is the construction in common recoveries. The method
of construction which in that case gives to the persons in remainder,
for their security and representative, the door-keeper, crier, or
sweeper of the court, or some other shadowy being without substance or
effect, is a fiction of a very coarse texture. This was however suffered
by the acquiescence of the whole kingdom, for ages; because the evasion
of the old statute of Westminster, which authorized perpetuities, had
more sense and utility than the