resolution; and when the mover
followed it up by a second, declaring that "it is competent to this
House to examine into and to correct abuses in the expenditure of the
civil list revenues, as well as in every other branch of the public
revenue, whenever it shall seem expedient to the wisdom of this House to
do so," though the minister, with what was almost an appeal _ad
misericordiam_, "implored the House not to proceed," he did not venture
to take a division, and that resolution also, with one or two others
designed to give instant effect to them, were adopted and reported by
the committee to the House in a single evening.[66] The first resolution
did, in fact, embody a complaint, or at least an assertion, which the
Rockingham party had constantly made ever since the close of the
Marquis's first administration. In a speech which he had made only a few
weeks before,[67] Lord Rockingham himself had declared that "it was
early in the present reign promulgated as a court axiom that the power
and influence of the crown alone was sufficient to support any set of
men his Majesty might think proper to call to his councils." And Burke,
in his "short account" of his administration of 1765, had not only
imputed both its formation and its dismissal to the "express request"
and "express command of their royal master," but in the sentence, "they
discountenanced and, it is to be hoped, forever abolished, the dangerous
and unconstitutional practice of removing military officers for their
votes in Parliament," condemned with unmistakable plainness some acts of
the preceding ministry which were universally understood to have been
forced upon it by the King himself. General Conway had been deprived of
the colonelcy of his regiment; Lord Rockingham himself, with several
other peers, had been dismissed from Lord-lieutenancies, as a punishment
for voting against the ministry; such dismissals being a flagrant
attempt to put down all freedom of debate in Parliament, which of all
its privileges is the one most essential to its usefulness, if not to
its very existence. But, as Burke said, the practice had been abandoned,
and the first resolution, therefore, as Lord North said, involved no
practical result. It is the second resolution that confers a
constitutional character and importance on this debate. And it is not
too much to say that no vote of greater value had been come to for many
years. It might have been considered almost as the assert