nisterial
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 advise 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, the more dangerous the abuse.
Since the Revolution, at least, the power of the nation has all flowed
with a full tide into the House of Commons. Secondly, because the House
of Commons, as it is the most powerful, is the most corruptible part of
the whole Constitution. Our public wounds cannot be concealed; to be
cured, they must be laid open. The public does think we are a corrupt
body. In our _legislative capacity_, we are, in most instances,
esteemed a very wise body; in our judicial, we have no credit, no
character at all. Our judgments stink in the nostrils of the people.
They think us to be not only without virtue, but without shame.
Therefore the greatness of our power, and the great and just opinion of
our corruptibility and our corruption, render it necessary to fix some
bound, to plant some landmark, which we are never to exceed. This is
what the bill proposes.

First, on this head, I lay it down as a fundamental rule in the law and
Constitution of this country, that this House has not by itself alone a
legislative authority in any case whatsoever. I know that the contrary
was the doctrine of the usurping House of Commons, which threw down the
fences and bulwarks of law, which annihilated first the lords, then the
crown, then its constituents. But the first thing that was done on the
restoration of the Constitution was to settle this point. Secondly, I
lay it down as a rule, that the power of occasional incapacitation, on
discreti