has arisen from the wars in which this country has been involved. Did gentlemen mean to assert, that those wars were not agreeable to the public opinion? Consider the history of the wars since the house of Hanover has been on the throne. The Spanish war; was that unpopular? It was entered upon on the express requisition of the people, and contrary to the known opinion of the government. The war of 1756; was that unpopular? Never was any country engaged in a more popular war. The American war; was that unpopular? He had heard it asserted by an hon. gentleman opposite to him, that that was the war of the people. Until within a year and a half of its conclusion, nothing could be more marked than the approbation which the public gave of that measure. It grew unpopular towards the end, as under similar circumstances every war will grow unpopular, because it was unsuccessful; and what was the consequence of this war becoming unpopular? That the minister, who had the complete confidence of a parliament chosen in the year 1780, was forced by that parliament to quit his situation in less than eighteen months afterwards, in consequence of the ill success of the war! Take, he said, the administration of his right hon. friend. Would any body say, that that administration, which had had the confidence of the House of Commons, had not likewise the confidence of the public? He would admit that that was no proof alone of the administration being good; but that was not the question. The point that they were to decide was, had public opinion its full weight in the deliberation of parliament? By the confidence which parliament had placed in his right hon. friend, the public opinion had proved to be in unison with the opinion of that House. But it was said, that there were some measures of the present administration approved of by that House, and which the public were averse from. Very possibly. The difference of that House from the public, on any particular measure, could be no objection; for if that House had not the power of differing from the public, nay, if it did not sometimes differ from them, it would cease to be a deliberative assembly. But the Russian war had been stated, and much had been dwelt on this. The House were well acquainted with his opinion on that subject. He would suppose, however, [VOL. XXX. ] for argument's sake, that his opinion was completely wrong; that ministers were wrong in arming for the purpose of obtaining Oczakow, and were wrong, having so armed, in disarming without obtaining it. What does that prove with respect to the decisions of that House? Nothing, unless it could be shown that that which was said to be the defect in our representation, was the cause of those decisions. If it could be shown, for instance, that the members for the close boroughs had, in fact, occasioned those decisions, contrary to the opinions of the landed and commercial interests in that House, the objection, as far as respects that particular case, might avail. But the reverse was the fact. A much greater number of members for counties and populous places voted with administration than voted against them; and as many members for close boroughs, in proportion, voted in the minority as in the majority of that House. The objection, then, proved nothing. Form a House of Commons as you please,-assemble the people in Salisbury Plain-you cannot prevent their having improper attachments and improper aversions. You cannot prevent their placing too much confidence in one minister, because they approve of him, and too little in another, because they disapprove of him. The defect is not in the representation; it is in human nature, and our eyes had better be turned to an improvement of that. He then said, that though public opinion he had always thought should have a certain weight in the constitution, he was fearful lest our government should become too democratic. Every man who pushed the democratic principles of the constitution too far was, in fact, an enemy to it. He was of the same opinion with respect to those who pushed the monarchical or aristocratical principles of it beyond their proper limits. It was certainly the principle of the British constitution, that monarchy, aristocracy, and democracy should serve as a control on each other; but it was likewise a principle, that on ordinary occasions they should and must co-operate. If the monarchy, the aristocracy, and the democracy are too much unconnected, the purpose of control may be answered, but the purpose of co-operation will be defeated. No one of the principles, therefore, ought to be forced beyond a certain extent. If any person was to be forced to live under a simple monarchy, [3 G] he would choose a moderate monarchy. | unparalleled in either ancient or modern If any person was forced to live under a history? What, then, must be that tree simple aristocracy, he would choose a which could produce such fruit! But it moderate aristocracy. If any person was was not on the effects of our system only forced to live under a simple democracy, that it was necessary to rest, those who he would, of course, choose a moderate had passed their lives in the studies of democracy. If then, you are to live under speculative retirement, and who had bethe three united, it becomes still more come acquainted with human nature, but necessary that each should be moderate from books, have beheld with regret the in itself; because without that, co-opera- capricious tyrannies of absolute monarchy, tion, which is absolutely necessary, could the systematic oppression of aristocracy, not subsist between them. the turbulent, factious, and unsettled disposition of democracy. They considered that a system might be founded out of the three, where the faults of each might correct the faults of the other, and where the virtues of each might prove an aid to the virtues of the other. Should we, then, who enjoy such blessings from such a system, on the pretence of some trifling defects in the theory, be disposed to hazard its existence? Should we contemplate the spots of the sun, regardless of its splendour? Should we seek glasses to magnify those spots which, to common eyes, are not even visible, and when the lustre of the celestial body is so great, that no part of nature can complain of a defect of its rays? But the spots of the sun do in some degree diminish its splendour. In works of art, it frequently happens that those which appear defective, are in fact the reverse; speculative theories are generally founded on ideas of perfection which do not exist: human institutions must be adapted not only to the virtues, but to the weakness and passions of mankind. Thus is it frequently necessary to follow that by indirect ways, which by the straight road we never could hope to arrive at. That there were theoretic defects in the composition of the House of Commons, was not what he pretended to deny; it was incumbent, however, on those who proposed a reform, to prove that those defects affected the practice of the constitution. He contended that he had proved the reverse; that they were necessary to the constitution; and that any attempt to reform them might prove dangerous to its very existence. He declared, that no person had more extensive ideas of liberty than he had; but it was not by any exclusive attachment to the democratic part of our constitution, that that love of liberty was to be manifest ed; democratic tyranny was at least as bad as either monarchial or aristocratical tyranny. The liberty we had the blessing to enjoy, did not arise from any part of the constitution, but from the operation of the different parts of it on each other. In the true sense of liberty, it was the end of all government; men fled from a state of nature to a state of society because, in the former, the first blessing of liberty, security, could not be obtained. But when he talked of liberty, he meant not any abstract ideas of the rights of man; he meant practical liberty. Of this he might say, that was the best government which had the most of it; or, in other words, that was the best government where there was the greatest security, and the least restraint. He was not so ignorant, however, of human nature, as to suppose that every country could enjoy an equal share of it. The liberty of a country must depend on its government; and very little experience, indeed, would teach us, that different countries require very different governments; that in considering what government would suit a country, the extent of it, the population of it, nay, the climate, must in some degree be attended to. How, then, were we to judge whether the government was well adapted to the country?-By the effects it produced. Is property secure? Is the administration of justice correct? Are the laws mild? Do the lower orders of the community appear contented? Wherever these blessings exist, the government from which they originate must necessarily be good. Let us judge of the British constitution on this principle. Is not property secured? Is not the administration of justice pure and correct? Have we not, in short, arrived at a pitch of prosperity Mr. Powys, before he proceeded to discuss the question before the House, wished to answer a charge adduced against him of his having made a distinction between the members who composed the House, by attaching to a part the appellation of independent. By this epithet he certainly did not mean the landed interest alone; he meant persons neither holding nor expecting any office. On the present day, the hon. mover had come forward as the organ and delegate of a society, constituted for the purpose of checking the progress of disaffection and discontentof waiting for the operation of the public mind, and of holding no communication with visionary speculators. In process of time, however, these Friends of the People joined with the performers from another theatre, and they had acted together, at the Crown and Anchor tavern more than once. If, however, at their meetings inflammatory language were held-if there were any who talked of embodying all the proud flesh and blood of the country, he was convinced that such speeches proceeded not from the crowds of the people, and was totally disowned by them. The hon. mover had said that the example of France ought not to deter the House from adopting a reform. To this argument he did not feel disposed to accede, after the sen timents disclosed by M. Condorcet, which sentiments he begged leave to read. They related to the formation of the society of the Friends of the People, which the writer trusted would produce the same symptoms in England as had preceded the convocation of the states-general of France in 1788. Our constitution, Mr. Powys said had, in former ages, been the delight and envy of mankind, when all other nations lay groaning under despotism, or, what was worse, under anarchy; and he trusted it would ever be found a happy exception from the confusion into which other countries were hurried by their efforts to escape from tyranny. The happy frame of our government freed us from the two extremes. When the representative part of the legislature had an identity of interest and a conformity of sentiments with its constituents, it inevitably followed, that the people were well governed and happy. That this was the case at the present moment with us, appeared so manifest, that it would be time thrown away to prove it. When gentlemen talked of restoring the people to equal representation, he desired to know, to what criterion that equality could be referred? He desired to hear, what that period was where the representor and represented met constitutionally, and where the standard of constitutional perfection stood? The House of Commons was an organ, not merely to speak the public voice, or register the public opinions, but possessing judgment to deliberate, and power to execute the result of that deliberation. As such he could listen to no such measures as were now dictated, and should therefore dissent from the motion. Mr. Windham, after stating his anxiety to deliver his sentiments, confessed that he felt infinite difficulty in connecting, combining, and comparing all the reasons and arguments offered by the hon. gentleman from whom the motion had proceeded. Never had there been a question offered to the House so repugnant to reason, and so adverse to every principle of common sense. It was a question, in the discussion of which objections of the most opposite nature arose every moment, and when one had been answered, others immediately started up, like Bayes's troops, as if nothing had happened. Much as he had attended to the speech of his hon. friend, he had not been able to discover whether the question was a question of expediency or of right. Indeed his hon. friend must excuse him, if he considered him only as a speck or spot (luminous perhaps) when compared with the vast importance of the subject " Pars minima est ipsa puella sui." He put him out of his consideration, and weighed him in his scale only as an atom. His hon. friend proceeded, very properly, on the ground of expediency; others, on the ground of right. The last were certainly the most numerous and the most powerful. the petitions that had been presented stated the right, and, indeed, his hon friend could not correct the contagion. Those persons who supported the doctrine of right, supported it on the supposed natural equality of man, and on this position, that the will of the majority ought to be obligatory on the minority. A discussion of these two principles was better adapted to a society of learned men than to a large deliberative assembly; and he could not but lament that they had ever been supposed to attach to the business of common life. To apply these metaphysical arguments as rules of conduct would, in his own opinion, be like turning a mill by the power of music, or raising a wall, like another Amphion, by a tune. On each, however, of these principles of equality, and the paramount nature of the majority of wills, he wished to say a few words. With regard to the first, that run so trippingly from the tongue, he should be glad to hear a definition of it; but nothose who were so fond of it never would vouchsafe to give one; or, if they did, it All was in the nature of answering idem per idem, or ignotum per ignotius. The definition he had formed in his own mind was this that as the end of all government was, to produce the greatest possible sum of happiness, so, in producing it, government was not to look for its residence in any particular part. No ravages were to be made on the happiness of the greater part for the purpose of conferring that happiness on the smaller. Whether this definition would be received by such persons as supported the doctrine of right, he could not tell. He believed, however, that it would not: for from it resulted all possible inequality, particularly with respect to property. They seemed to say, that as long as persons continued to talk abstractedly of mankind, they must consider them as equal.-He came next to the second of these pernicious principles; namely that in all societies and states the will of the majority ought to govern. In opposition to this he felt no difficulty in affirming, that it was not a general principle of government, nor consonant to the spirit and the practice of ours in particular, that the numerical majority should decide for the whole. An ingenious author, whom he admired more as a philologist than a politician, he meant Mr. Horne Tooke, had said, with some pleasantry, that many of the evils of life arose for want of a right understanding of particles. Just so, he imagined, many of the errors of these new political philosophizers originated in a misunderstanding of particles. They said, for instance, that all government proceeded from the people; now if, instead of the particle from, they would insert the particle for, their proposition would be not only intelligible, but true; and yet on the stupid confounding of these two, not indeed by stupid, but very ingenious, men, did they rest their wild and injurious speculations. When he denied the right of the majority to govern the whole, and decide in all cases, he might be asked what he would substitute for it-If he would take the minority? He would not say so, though even that proposition would not be more absurd than the other, in the manner they argued upon it. He would rest the decision on the merits and the justice of the point to be decided; and as men would see those more or less clearly in proportion to their greater or less degrees of information, it followed that the majority was not the most likely to be in the right. If twenty persons of ordinary ca- water on lime would put it out? No. But even were he, for his own part, to be sure that the people would stop at a particular spot, still he would not agree to it. If there was even no mischievous consequences couched in the measure, he would object to it, as producing no good. Besides, he denied the extent of the grievance complained of. "All's not offence that indiscretion finds, "Or rashness deems so.But those offences were, he said, so mixed and interwoven with perfections, that the one could not be removed without destroying the other. The House could not pretend to correct blemishes in the constitution. It was like the style of ancient authors, of which the critics said, “Qui had made good their station there, they | knew that success must attend their endeavours. It had been said that the people had a right to demand, that the extension of the duration of parliament from three years to seven was an invasion of their rights. For his own part, he did not know whether it would not be an invasion of their rights to make the duration of parliaments again triennial; for, upon this mode of reasoning every thing but pure democracy was an invasion of their rights. Few grievances had been complained of by his hon. friend, and those few operated against him. In the case of 1784 he differed in opinion with him. It had been a complaint against all former parliaments, that they had been too much addicted to the minister of the day. As soon, how-corrigit delet tam vitia virtutibus mixta." ever, as they went against him, they were What some people called its faults could thrown to the people, and devoured by not be corrected without destroying all them with all the savage ferocity ofhounds. its valuable parts. Many things, he was At the present period, the effect of legiti-aware, might have escaped him. Some mate assemblies, emanating from the peo- circumstances more might transpire. If ple, had been seen in France. The present a discussion must take place on such subNational Convention, though the legiti- jects, he would advise the House to mate representatives of the people, were "drink deep or taste not." If the princioverawed by two other bodies of men. "I ples were to be examined, the fallacy of think there be six Richmonds in the them would soon be detected; and if any field." They were kept by those socie- dared to inhibit, he would promise them ties in the most strict submission. "You that they would be reduced to the conshall be king, and I will be viceroy over dition of being the babies of a girl. you."-With respect to a perfect coin- disliked this mixture of politics and metacidence in opinion with the people, he con- physics [A laugh]. With much warmth tended that all good proceeded on a dif- the right hon. gentleman desired those ference in opinion with the people, and who disliked his metaphysics to answer that nothing could be so calamitous to them. This species of argument had the House as to become the agents of the commenced with the American war, and people. For his own part, he thought had been carried down to the present pethat a case of a different sort ought to riod. It was a contemptible chegoe, have been made out. The probable loss which, if suffered to penetrate the skin, ought to be opposed to the probable gain. would bury itself in the inflammation It ought to be recollected, that the mo- which it had excited, and eat to the bone, tions of the heavenly bodies could be defying the power of art to remove it, alknown to the end of centuries; but the though in the first instance an old woman impulses of the heart could not be known might pick it out with a needle. from one day to another. The grievances, then, ought first to be felt before a remedy ought to be applied; for should the people think such a reform as the present ineffectual, they would not stop. To give them any thing short of the entire completion of their wishes would be like throwing crumbs to hungry men, who have stomachs for greater things. His hon. friend, therefore, might open the door, but would he be able to shut it? No. Did he not know that some things would take fire as well by cold as by hot water? Did he'imagine that throwing cold He Mr. Erskine said, that had he been absent at the opening of the debate, and unacquainted with the motion before the House, he should have thought, from the manner and argument of the hon. gentleman who had just sat down, that some proposition had been brought forward not only big with ruin to the interests of this country, but such a one as had never before entered in the mind of any man to project.-At all events, he certainly never could have collected from the smile of approbation which covered the features of the right hon. gentleman opposite (Mr. |