re shown that the power of incapacitation is a legislative
power; I have shown that legislative power does not belong to the House
of Commons; and therefore it follows that the House of Commons has not a
power of incapacitation.

I know not the origin of the House of Commons, but am very sure that it
did not create itself; the electors were prior to the elected, whose
rights originated either from the people at large, or from some other
form of legislature, which never could intend for the chosen a power of
superseding the choosers.

If you have not a power of declaring an incapacity simply by the mere
act of declaring it, it is evident to the most ordinary reason you
cannot have a right of expulsion, inferring, or rather including, an
incapacity. For as the law, when it gives any direct right, gives also
as necessary incidents all the means of acquiring the possession of that
right, so, where it does not give a right directly, it refuses all the
means by which such a right may by any mediums be exercised, or in
effect be indirectly acquired. Else it is very obvious that the
intention of the law in refusing that right might be entirely
frustrated, and the whole power of the legislature baffled. If there be
no certain, invariable rule of eligibility, it were better to get
simplicity, if certainty is not to be had, and to resolve all the
franchises of the subject into this one short proposition,--the will and
pleasure of the House of Commons.

The argument drawn from the courts of law applying the principles of law
to new cases as they emerge is altogether frivolous, inapplicable, and
arises from a total ignorance of the bounds between civil and criminal
jurisdiction, and of the separate maxims that govern these two
provinces of law, that are eternally separate. Undoubtedly the courts of
law, where a new case comes before them, as they do every hour, then,
that there may be no defect in justice, call in similar principles, and
the example of the nearest determination, and do everything to draw the
law to as near a conformity to general equity and right reason as they
can bring it with its being a fixed principle. _Boni judicis est
ampliare justitiam_,--that is, to make open and liberal justice. But in
criminal matters this parity of reason and these analogies ever have
been and ever ought to be shunned.

Whatever is incident to a court of judicature is necessary to the House
of Commons as judging in elections. But a p