mmons of the very same origin, and of no other. We and
our electors have powers and privileges both made and circumscribed by
prescription, as much to the full as the other parts; and as such we have
always claimed them, and on no other title. The House of Commons is a
legislative body corporate by prescription, not made upon any given
theory, but existing prescriptively--just like the rest. This
prescription has made it essentially what it is--an aggregate collection
of three parts--knights, citizens, burgesses. The question is, whether
this has been always so, since the House of Commons has taken its present
shape and circumstances, and has been an essential operative part of the
Constitution; which, I take it, it has been for at least five hundred
years.

This I resolve to myself in the affirmative: and then another question
arises; whether this House stands firm upon its ancient foundations, and
is not, by time and accidents, so declined from its perpendicular as to
want the hand of the wise and experienced architects of the day to set it
upright again, and to prop and buttress it up for duration;--whether it
continues true to the principles upon which it has hitherto
stood;--whether this be _de facto_ the Constitution of the House of
Commons as it has been since the time that the House of Commons has,
without dispute, become a necessary and an efficient part of the British
Constitution? To ask whether a thing, which has always been the same,
stands to its usual principle, seems to me to be perfectly absurd; for
how do you know the principles but from the construction? and if that
remains the same, the principles remain the same. It is true, that to
say your Constitution is what it has been, is no sufficient defence for
those who say it is a bad Constitution. It is an answer to those who say
that it is a degenerate Constitution. To those who say it is a bad one,
I answer, Look to its effects. In all moral machinery the moral results
are its test.

On what grounds do we go to restore our Constitution to what it has been
at some given period, or to reform and reconstruct it upon principles
more conformable to a sound theory of government? A prescriptive
government, such as ours, never was the work of any legislator, never was
made upon any foregone theory. It seems to me a preposterous way of
reasoning, and a perfect confusion of ideas, to take the theories, which
learned and speculative men have made from