ut the whole
body.

Yet, important as was the principle contained in these measures, none of
them, perhaps, caused such excitement at the moment as an exercise by
the government of what was, in point of fact, one of its most ancient,
as well as most essential, powers: the occasional opening of letters
which passed through the post, in compliance with a warrant of the
Secretary of State. England had at all times been the refuge of those
unquiet spirits who, in pursuit of their schemes of rebellion and
revolution, had incurred the displeasure of their own governments, and
had too easily found accomplices here. And in the course of the summer
some notorious offenders of this class found a member of the House of
Commons to present a petition, in which they complained that some
letters which they had posted had been stopped and opened by the
officers of the Post-office. The member who presented the petition
appears to have fancied it an unprecedented and wholly unlawful exercise
of authority; but Sir James Graham, the Home-secretary, not only at once
avowed that the statement was true, and that he had issued his warrant
for the opening of the letters mentioned, but also showed that the power
to issue such an order was reserved to the Secretary of State in all the
statutes which regulated the proceedings of the Post-office. The clause
in the act which conferred the power had been originally framed by Lord
Somers, a statesman certainly as little open as any of his time to the
suspicion of desiring to encroach on the rightful liberty of the
subject; and it had been exercised from time to time in every reign
since the Revolution. It was a power intrusted to the Secretaries of
State for the public safety, and exercised by them on their own
responsibility. The practice and its justification were assailed in both
Houses of Parliament by members of the extreme Liberal party; but,
though no distinct motion on the subject was made, the general feeling
of both Houses was plainly evinced, that it was a power which might at
times be highly useful for the prevention of crime, or for the
hinderance of conspiracies which might be dangerous to the general
welfare and tranquillity, and that the constitutional responsibility
attaching to every minister for every official act was a sufficient
security against its being improperly used.[264]

And it will, probably, be generally admitted that this was the
statesman-like view of the subject. The