of the petition, and the facts being
proved, a bill was brought in and carried, by which eighty-one freemen
of Shoreham were disfranchised; and the Shoreham franchise was extended
to all the freeholders of the neighbouring district, called the Rape of
Bramber, who occupied tenements of the annual value of forty shillings.
At the same time Roberts was reprimanded at the bar of the house by the
speaker, for his assumption of illegal authority.

RESOLUTIONS RESPECTING THE PUBLICATION OF DEBATES.

Up to this period it had been held that to publish the debates of
either house of parliament was a breach of privilege. The editors
of periodicals had, indeed, endeavoured to evade the prohibition by
publishing mutilated and occasionally invented speeches of honourable
and noble lords, under fictitious names; but the people did not even
obtain this doubtful information till after the discussion was over,
and the matter in debate settled. The public, however, were now becoming
more enlightened, and withal more curious, and these garbled and stale
speeches did not satisfy them;--they longed for a full reporting
newspaper, and the printers were encouraged by the general feeling to
venture upon giving the proceedings in parliament from week to week, or
from day to day, as they occurred. They were the more induced to take
this step because the extent of the power of parliament to enforce this
question of privilege had never been accurately defined. The letters of
Junius, also, had a great effect in confirming them in their resolution:
accordingly, during the Middlesex elections and the debates on the
affairs of the Falkland Islands, the public were gratified with certain
and immediate intelligence of what their representatives were doing. But
this was not likely to be allowed by parliament without a struggle. The
members of both houses had been strenuous in their endeavours to
shut their doors in the face of the nation--to choke all attempts
at publicity, and to seclude themselves as rigorously as a jury, and
therefore the proprietors of these newly established papers, must have
expected, sooner or later, to be disturbed in their occupations. On
the 5th of February their anticipations were realized. Colonel George
Onslow, now one of the lords of the treasury, denounced the insolence
and wickedness of these proceedings, as tending to the destruction of
all things to be venerated in our constitution; and, on the 26th of
the same m