this House. Here it
is not, how long the people are bound to tolerate the illegality of our
judgments, but whether we have a right to substitute our occasional
opinion in the place of law, so as to deprive the citizen of his
franchise....

SPEECH

ON

A BILL FOR SHORTENING THE DURATION OF PARLIAMENTS.

MAY 8, 1780.

It is always to be lamented, when men are driven to search into the
foundations of the commonwealth. It is certainly necessary to resort to
the theory of your government, whenever you propose any alteration in
the frame of it,--whether that alteration means the revival of some
former antiquated and forsaken constitution of state, or the
introduction of some new improvement in the commonwealth. The object of
our deliberation is, to promote the good purposes for which elections
have been instituted, and to prevent their inconveniences. If we thought
frequent elections attended with no inconvenience, or with but a
trifling inconvenience, the strong overruling principle of the
Constitution would sweep us like a torrent towards them. But your remedy
is to be suited to your disease, your present disease, and to your whole
disease. That man thinks much too highly, and therefore he thinks weakly
and delusively, of any contrivance of human wisdom, who believes that it
can make any sort of approach to perfection. There is not, there never
was, a principle of government under heaven, that does not, in the very
pursuit of the good it proposes, naturally and inevitably lead into some
inconvenience which makes it absolutely necessary to counterwork and
weaken the application of that first principle itself, and to abandon
something of the extent of the advantage you proposed by it, in order
to prevent also the inconveniences which have arisen from the instrument
of all the good you had in view.

To govern according to the sense and agreeably to the interests of the
people is a great and glorious object of government. This object cannot
be obtained but through the medium of popular election; and popular
election is a mighty evil. It is such and so great an evil, that, though
there are few nations whose monarchs were not originally elective, very
few are now elected. They are the distempers of elections that have
destroyed all free states. To cure these distempers is difficult, if not
impossible; the only thing, therefore, left to save the commonwealth is,
to prevent their return too frequently. The objects i