another, and disputes will arise about the
limits of their several rights and privileges. It may be almost
impossible to reconcile them.

Carry the principle on by which you expelled Mr. Wilkes, there is not a
man in the House, hardly a man in the nation, who may not be
disqualified. That this House should have no power of expulsion is a
hard saying. That this House should have a general discretionary power
of disqualification is a dangerous saying. That the people should not
choose their own representative, is a saying that shakes the
Constitution. That this House should name the representative, is a
saying which, followed by practice, subverts the constitution. They have
the right of electing, you have a right of expelling; they of choosing,
you of judging, and only of judging, of the choice. What bounds shall be
set to the freedom of that choice? Their right is prior to ours, we all
originate there. They are the mortal enemies of the House of Commons,
who would persuade them to think or to act as if they were a
self-originated magistracy, independent of the people and unconnected
with their opinions and feelings. Under a pretence of exalting the
dignity, they undermine the very foundations of this House. When the
question is asked here, what disturbs the people, whence all this
clamour, we apply to the treasury-bench, and they tell us it is from the
efforts of libellers and the wickedness of the people, a worn-out
ministerial pretence. If abroad the people are deceived by popular,
within we are deluded by ministerial, cant. The question amounts to
this, whether you mean to be a legal tribunal, or an arbitrary and
despotic assembly. I see and I feel the delicacy and difficulty of the
ground upon which we stand in this question. I could wish, indeed, that
they who advised the Crown had not left Parliament in this very
ungraceful distress, in which they can neither retract with dignity nor
persist with justice. Another parliament might have satisfied the people
without lowering themselves. But our situation is not in our own choice:
our conduct in that situation is all that is in our own option. The
substance of the question is, to put bounds to your own power by the
rules and principles of law. This is, I am sensible, a difficult thing
to the corrupt, grasping, and ambitious part of human nature. But the
very difficulty argues and enforces the necessity of it. First, because
the greater the power,