out due consideration; and where were persons of this distinction to be found or expected but in that House? He begged of them to preserve the dignity of the House, the respectability which had always attended their proceedings; the right not of any individual, but all individuals; not of the city of Westminster, but of all the cities in the kingdom; the question was general, and this night's decision would have a general effect; and if ever men were called upon to decide impartially, and according to the best of their judgments, it was now.

The Master of the Rolls said he was not a little averse, from the beginning, to take any part in this debate; for it hitherto happened, that he had not met with that respect which he thought his conduct, whatever his opinions were, entitled him to. The gentlemen on the other side had treated him with personalities, which he did not like, and which did them at least as little honour as him. It was not long ago since an hon. gentleman (Mr. Montagu) contested his right to a seat in that assembly: the same kind of sarcasms had been pretty frequent from others in the same way of thinking; and to-night he had been told that he was the keeper of the conscience of the majority of the House; how far he was entitled to such an appellation, the hon. gentleman best knew who bestowed it; but he would appeal to the House, whether such a line of debate became them. If that hon. gentleman had conceived any dislike or aversion to him, it would have been more manly and candid to have mentioned it fairly and privately, than to come to the senate and throw out whatever he conceived to be most disrespectful. He could assure that hon. gentleman that he should always be found at home, and that whatever way he put his objections, they should meet with such an answer as he thought it his duty to give. He would also take the liberty of telling him, that he had as good a right to speak his mind, that he was as independent a member of parliament, that he was every way as honest a man, and as sincerely desirous of doing his duty to the best of his abilities, as that or any other gentleman in the House. But why were these attacks so constantly levelled at him? If they conceived that, by that means he was to be intimidated from either declaring his attachment to the truth, or acting as he conceived his own conscience and the laws

of the country directed him, they would find themselves completely deceived. Much as had been said on the law part of the question, nothing had yet reached his ears which in any degree invalidated the opinion which he had the honour of stating to the House on a former occasion. He did not think it necessary now, however, to go over that ground again. He was not at present disposed to quote cases, or cite books, as he had then been obliged to do; still less should he be under the necessity of having recourse to the technical phraseology of the science. And if ever he was obscure or abstruse on the subject, it was more on the account of others, than any difficulty which had occurred to himself on the subject. For, indeed, he had always conceived it to be a very clear and intelligible point. It was no more, in his idea, than, that a returning officer had done that which the law which prescribed the duty must be supposed to have allowed him for executing it; that is to say, he had taken the necessary time to do the business. This was the precise light in which it had always struck him. The great facts he had ever conceived to be, that the poll was protracted to such a length, as precluded the returning officer from that time before the expiration of the writ, in which he ought to have made up his mind on the subject. He urged the House not to abandon that plain line of consistency to which it was their highest honour in all cases to adhere. He warned them against the force of that eloquence, however powerful, which had so often been employed on this subject; and he doubted not, would again be employed to impress gentlemen with an idea of personal persecution, of something mighty unconstitutional in the whole of this business. He begged they would recollect that when the resolution was voted, which it was now the object to rescind, that they were fully convinced in their own minds. The question was no longer of a kind to bear hard on any individual. It was now general, and had a general aspect. Why, therefore, depart from what had already been done deliberately, coolly, and from conviction? What other purpose could be answered by rescinding this resolution, than swelling the triumph of those who had then differed from them?

Mr. Scott said, that he was one of those who had voted against the first proposition moved by a learned friend of his, now on

one gentleman disapproved of the conduct of another, the House was undoubtedly the only proper place for final conclusions. He was therefore inconsiderate in requiring that explanations on such a subject should be made out of doors. The question had hitherto been discussed legally. If the House would give him leave, he would look at it in a political point of view, and that, he said, was, in his opinion, the ground upon which it had originally been taken up by the other side of the House; for he verily believed, had there not existed a political contest there, the Westminster scrutiny would never have been countenanced. In the case of the Middlesex election, had any other man than Mr. Wilkes been the successful candidate, the House, he verily believed, would not have proceeded to the expulsions, and all the other measures they were induced to take. So in the case of Westminster, had not his right hon. friend been the party, he was pretty well convinced that House would have heard very little about the matter. He hoped, how ever, as in the former case, good would come out of evil. To the Middlesex election Mr. Grenville's Bill owed its origin; he hoped a bill equally salutary would be the consequence of the Westminster election. He trusted that those gentlemen who, from a conviction of the illegality or inefficacy of the scrutiny, had voted for its discontinuance, would, on this occasion, come forward, and obliterate from their Journals the memory of such a transaction.

The Solicitor General contended, that returning officers were not bound in every possible contingency to make a return of their precepts on the precise day required by the exigency of the writ. He said that extreme cases had been put to shew, that by corrupting all the returning officers of the kingdom, they might, by instituting such proceedings as those of the high bailiff of Westminster, keep this country without any parliament at all. But he would also put an extreme case, though equally applicable with that now stated; suppose in the conduct of elections, matters should be so contrived as to procrastinate the poll till the last day, and by supplying it with persons who had no title to vote at elections, the greater number of real voters should be unpolled at the time of the expiration of the writ, would any person say, that a set of raggamuffins, forced in upon one of the legislative branches of this king

| dom, would be a species of representation, in any respect better than the total absence of any parliament? As the disadvantages were so equally balanced, the House would easily perceive that nothing was gained by putting cases so remote, and which in the reason of things could never happen. He said the writ had more than two objects; it had three. It commanded the returning officer to proceed at a given time and place to elect a burgess, and to take care that the candidate having the majority of legal votes was the party returned. He said, the single instance of a resolution having been expunged, was in the case of Dr. Nowell, who had received the thanks of the House for a sermon preached on the 30th of January, the vote of which thanks was afterwards ordered to be expunged.

Sir James Johnstone thought the present motion perfectly unjustifiable, when he called to mind that, on a former occasion, a relation of his had been committed to Newgate for only doubting the legality of a scrutiny. He said, if the House were to pronounce what was, and what was not law, there was an end of the legislation of parliament, of the courts of judicature, and of the liberties of Great Britain.

Mr. Bearcroft began by stating the representations made by the right hon. gentleman (Mr. Fox), both in and out of the House, of the severe persecution he suffered, pointing himself out in the most amiable of all lights, that of a poor and virtuous man struggling with adversity. In respect to what had been said on law; good law, in his opinion, would bear stripping, and always looked most handsome when it was plainly dressed. He said, that there could not be a precedent and a judgment in a case that had never happened. Time, which altered every thing, had altered the mode of elections; but the election itself still must be, and still was, on the same principle. He desired to resort to no stronger fountain than the writ itself. He then said, that divesting his argument as much as possible of the trappings of technical expressions, and translating the law into plain and intelligible language, he would lay before the House a clear statement of all that had been said on both sides of the question. He then proceeded to explain what an election was, and, from various premises, drew the conclusion, that a scrutiny was in every respect a part of the poll. If, then, it was part of the poll, it was in vain now to dis

legal. Why? Because the right hon and learned gentleman, and because other in high departments of the law, had thought proper to say they were so. Thi mode of appealing to a man's own autho

Mr. For at length got possession of the House, and began with observing, that he was particularly pleased when he saw the noble lord rise; for as the city of York had that day sent up instructions to their members to vote for rescinding those Resolutions, he was in hopes his lordship rose to obey the instructions of his constituents. He felt great satisfaction in finding the electors of the city of York had not changed their principles with their representative; they had felt like Englishmen upon the proceedings of the Westminster scrutiny, and had instructed their representatives to vote against it. One of them, he said, from a natural love of equity, and a due sense of the illegality of that House taking upon itself to direct that the scrutiny should be proceeded in, after the return of the writ, had uniformly voted with him on every question respecting it. He said he was glad to see that the alarm of establishing so fatal a precedent had extended itself throughout the kingdom; and though the city of York had been the first to take notice of it, and to instruct their members to oppose the continuance of the scrutiny, he had no doubt but a similar disapprobation of it prevailed in other places, because he was sure that all but those who were led away by motives of personal pique and party prejudice could be but of one opinion upon it. That it was illegal, that it was unconstitutional, that it was destructive of the rights of election, and injurious to that House, were facts so broad, so plain, so immoveable, that all the art, all the ingenuity, all the legal quibbles, and all the misrepresentations of the statute and the common law, that had peculiarly marked and distinguished the debate of that day, had not been able to disguise or to conceal. The hon. and learned gentleman who spoke first on the other side of the House had, in a most extraordinary and unprecedented manner, endeavoured to supply his lack of argument with the weight of authority. He had begged the House to believe that the proceedings upon their Journals were

was using for want of arguments, was, Mr Fox said, equally new and unprecedented but it was surely a pitiful resort for any man to fly to for shelter. When the bu siness of the Middlesex election was moved to be rescinded, and erased from their Journals, he, and those who with him had voted in support of it, had not acted in so paltry a manner. That business had been honoured with the support of the present lord Thurlow, the late lord Walsingham, and all the lawyers of those days, who, at least, were as good authorities as the right hon. and learned gentleman, and those who sat on the same bench with him; but they never dreamt when a proposition for expunging the proceedings on the Middlesex election from their Journal was in agitation, of bidding the House consider what high authorities had pronounced in their approbation; had they done so, they would have thought they acted in a mean and pitiful way. Mr. Fox took notice of the dark insinuations the right hon. and learned gentleman had chosen to throw out, and complained of the extreme unfairness of his charging him with having protracted the poll, and declaring that he had still his own opinion upon the subject. In this assertion he would not take the hon. and learned gentleman's word. The hon. and learned gentleman well knew that he had no more protracted the poll than sir Cecil Wray had protracted the poll, excepting only the three last days, when, unquestionably, he had not yielded to the application that was made to him, of concluding the poll for the direct purpose of instituting a scrutiny. He knew also that there was no ground whatever for his insinuations that there could still exist a doubt as to the real quarter from whence delay came. He knew that as fewer of his objections had failed than of the objections of the other party, he had not added to the delay of the scrutiny. If, after all that had passed upon the subject, the right hon. and learned gen leman had still opinions of his own, what sort of principles would he carry to the bench with him, when he should be made a judge; and what security could there be had in his administration of justice, who presumed to suggest and insinuate opinions contrary to

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