ever be a
first-rate object of ambition in England. Ambition is no exact
calculator. Avarice itself does not calculate strictly, when it games.
One thing is certain,--that in this political game the great lottery of
power is that into which men will purchase with millions of chances
against them. In Turkey, where the place, where the fortune, where the
head itself are so insecure that scarcely any have died in their beds
for ages, so that the bowstring is the natural death of bashaws, yet in
no country is power and distinction (precarious enough, God knows, in
all) sought for with such boundless avidity,--as if the value of place
was enhanced by the danger and insecurity of its tenure. Nothing will
ever make a seat in this House not an object of desire to numbers by any
means or at any charge, but the depriving it of all power and all
dignity. This would do it. This is the true and only nostrum for that
purpose. But an House of Commons without power and without dignity,
either in itself or in its members, is no House of Commons for the
purposes of this Constitution.

But they will be afraid to act ill, if they know that the day of their
account is always near. I wish it were true; but it is not: here again
we have experience, and experience is against us. The distemper of this
age is a poverty of spirit and of genius: it is trifling, it is futile,
worse than ignorant, superficially taught, with the politics and morals
of girls at a boarding-school rather than of men and statesmen: but it
is not yet desperately wicked, or so scandalously venal as in former
times. Did not a triennial Parliament give up the national dignity,
approve the peace of Utrecht, and almost give up everything else, in
taking every step to defeat the Protestant succession? Was not the
Constitution saved by those who had no election at all to go to, the
Lords, because the court applied to electors, and by various means
carried them from their true interests, so that the Tory ministry had a
majority without an application to a single member? Now as to the
conduct of the members, it was then far from pure and independent.
Bribery was infinitely more flagrant. A predecessor of yours, Mr.
Speaker, put the question of his own expulsion for bribery. Sir William
Musgrave was a wise man, a grave man, an independent man, a man of good
fortune and good family; however, he carried on, while in opposition, a
traffic, a shameful traffic, with the ministry. Bisho