and leads to a milder communication of manners, as well as diffusion of influence between landlord and tenant, with an additional teinptation of residence to the former, and improvement to the latter. It is, in short, an open of 200 seats to property, to talents, and to both mixed, to be elected by the yeomanry and citizens.

We have in this plan committed no violence on the principles of the constitution, and scarcely any on its geography. We have added one member to the counties and to the three cities, because we think the landed interest is not proportionably represented, and the ministerial interest beyond all proportion represented; and we have extended the boundary of the borough, because we find in the old boundary nothing to represent. We have not extended the boundary to the whole of the county, because we would not extinguish or overbalance an integral part of the parliament-the citizens and burgesses; and we have extended the line beyond the borough, to a line of twentyfour miles, to encompass a mass of landed interest as long as land is productive, and commercial interest, if within twenty-four miles any commerce shall exist. As commerce shall within that district increase and flourish, its balance on the return will increase, and there will yet remain a great landed interest in the representation, even though commerce should within that district totally decline. Thus we have, as far as is practicable, provided against the effect of the fluctuation of property; we have not corrected oligarchy, as was erroneously objected to us, by oligarchy, but by aristocracy and democracy mixed. We have applied the principles of the English constitution to the state of Irish property, with a decisive advantage for the present, and with such growing advantages to the future, as must arise from the growth of commerce and the growing diffusion of riches. Weigh, then, the objections to the bill, and you will find they amount either to a depreciation of the principles of the British constitution in their application to Ireland, or to a demand for an agrarian law.

I do not say that this bill, in its present shape, is perfect. On the contrary, I should wish to propose considerable alterations; the franchise should be extended to termors for years, perhaps some others; the duration of parliament should be diminished; the powers of the corporation to make voters totally extinguished. After these amendments, I do not say the bill would be then an exact representation of the property of the country, or of the propertied part of the community. No, because that is impossible, and that is unnecessary; no, but it would be a substantial representation of both; thai is, it would answer all the political purposes of adequate representation; it would be quod erat desideratum; it would not be arithmeti

cally equal, but it would be substantially and practically adequate; it would give to the mass of property, commercial and landed, instead of a fourth, the whole of the return of members to serve in Parliament, and with the mass of property it would give you the best chance for the mass of talents. But, says my right honourable friend,* why agitate the people now? We have not created, we have found the agitation of this subject, and therefore the question now is not whether we shall agitate or abandon this subject. And sure I am, that we should agitate the people much more by renouncing, than by pursuing their great object, a more equal representation of the people. We should then leave them at large on this subject to their own despair, or to those desperate suggestions which every seditious bungler may propose, while the abuses of your representation, abandoned to such hands, make every quack a doctor, and every fool a philosopher. Sir, it is the excellence of our constitution that it contains in itself the seeds of its own reformation; and to this excellence I attribute its duration. Other countries have preserved abuses until they accumulated, and were finally levelled but with the establishments themselves, by the deluge of anarchy, instead of being removed by reformation. You yourselves to a degree were sensible of this, and have inade reforms in the executive and in the judicial branches; but in the representation you however have made none; and without reforms in the latter, you will have made none of any great effect in the former; for until the present representation is reformed, your bench of justice, your executive power, your house of peers, will be from time to time, as they have been, contaminated, by sacrificing the first to the application of the boroughmonger; by modelling the second merely to gratify the same boroughmonger; and by the sale of the peerage for the boroughmonger, to the disgrace of one house, and the corruption of both. So strongly am I of this opinion, that I imagine with a reform in the abuse of representation, all the other abuses would be quelled; whereas without it, the reform of the other abuses will be but plausible and palliative. But, says the right honourable baronet, is not this reform a step to a succession of innovation? He goes farther; he says, does it not lead to a personal representation? to which I directly answer, it leads from personal representation, not to it; it ascertains representation to property, and to the propertied community; and whatever force, weight, influence, or authority both Fossess, unites them against the attempt in favour of personal represcutation.

* Sir H. Langrishe.

Freeholders, leaseholders, and all resident trading interests, are now in the struggle of our parliamentary constitution spectators; they would then be parties. They now enjoy a power of returning one-fifth of the House, and therefore are little interested for it; and they may have a speculation on the interest that might arise to them on the throwing up that fifth, and dividing the whole with the population; therefore some of them may be parties against it; but if they had the whole of the return, they would then be the proprietors, and they would defend the parliamentary constitution against innovation, with the same zeal with which the oligarch now defeuds his boroughs against reformation; but with this difference, that the existing parliamentary constitution would then be defended against innovation with the strength of all the property and all the propertied public; whereas it is now defended with the strength of about forty individuals, and about £200,000 rental; that is, without the strength of population or of property: and it is a decided proof of its weakness, that the boroughmongers could not now defend it without the influence of government; and a further proof of its weakness is the proposal of a plan of personal representation. Sir, could such a monster be offered as a proposal, that the persons who receive alms should vote the taxes, if there was not another monster much less misproportioned, but a monster notwithstanding, in the existing constitution, where a few individuals, as little the property of the country as its population, vote those taxes? It follows from what I have said, that the best method of securing the parliamentary constitution is to embody in its support the mass of property, which will be generally found to include the mass of talents; and that the worst way of securing your parliamentary constitution is to rest it on oligarchy-oligarchy! that is a bad form of government; oligarchy! that is always a weak one.

But, says the right honourable baronet, France! Take warning from France. If France is to be a lesson, take the whole of that lesson; if her frantic convention is to be a monitress against the vices of a republic, let the causes which produced that convention be an admonition against the abuses of monarchy. France would reform nothing until abuses accumulated, and goverument was swept away in the deluge; until an armed force redressed the state, and then, as will be generally the case, united on becoming the government. It was not a progress from reformation to innovation, but from one modification of a military government, that is, of one anarchy to another. In principle, therefore, the case of France does not apply; in policy still less; for sure I am, if there is an attempt

to introduce the rebellious graces of a republic into these countries, the best precaution is to discountenance them by the sober attractions of a limited monarchy, and the worst precaution is to preserve all the abuses of the latter, to preëngage men against the vices of the former.

On this principle, I conceive the enemies to the constitution are the extremes, the advocate for its abuses and the leveller of its estab lishments. The advocate for its abuses falsifies the origin of the Commons in order to support the defects in the representation. He states that the Commons were seldom called, and then only for subsidy, and this he calls the original purity of the English constitution. The period of its formation, as best ascertained, was the time of the Edwards; and in the reign of Edward I. there were about twentyfive parliaments; in the reign of Edward II. about eleven; and in that of Edward III. about seventy great councils or parliaments; and to these parliaments you find the Commons were summoned; therefore, it is ignorant to say that the Commons were seldom summoned, and it is no less ignorant to say they were only summoned for money; for you will, in the different parliaments of those reigns, find the Commons occupied with the subjects of war, peace, and treaty, the regulation of the household, the regulation of the King's counsellors, the staple, the coinage, the price of provision, the conduct of ministers, and the making of laws.

And if authority was necessary to support history, you find in the reign of Richard II., the statute of heresy taken off the roll, because smuggled through parliament without the assent of the Commons. You find Blackstone express in declaring that the principle of the constitution of parliament as it now stands, was laid in the charter, and that it existed, in fact, ever since the reign of Henry III. You will find writs extant, and the purposes for which the Commons were called, namely, the ardua regni, not subsidy, expressed in those writs; and you will from the whole conclude, that this advocate for abuses has traduced the inheritance of the people; and that instead of being called seldom, and then only for money, the Commons were, in the purity of the constitution, an essential part of the legislature; and you will also find that they were the representatives of landed and commercial property. In tracing the errors of the patron of abuses, you arrive at the truths which have confused him. He had probably heard of a general and a particular parliament, but had not learned to distinguish the purposes for which they were called; the general parliament being called for purposes affecting the realm; the particular, which is properly called a great council, for purposes affecting the order of men only of which that council was composed. Probably

the uncertainty of the writ of summons was another cause of his confusion; but he should have understood the reason, and then he would have learned that the writ followed the property, and when the borough was decayed, was not directed thereunto. Thus, in the thirty-fourth of Edward I., you find a summons to parliament of one or two burgesses from each borough, as the boroughs should be found greater or less: why? because the representation had reference to the property and not to the name; because, though the Commons were an essential part of the parliament, the particular borough was not an essential part of the Commons; because in the origin of the constitution there was a principle of reform as well as of property, which principle was then very improperly exercised by act of prerogative, and which it is now very properly proposed should be exercised by act of legislation.

The advocate for abuses having falsified the origin of the Commons, proceeds to falsify their importance, and tells us that the security of the liberty of the people is placed in the aristocratic influence of their representatives, and the inference of his observation he applies not only to Ireland, but to Great Britain. As the English Commons increased in aristocratic influence, says the patron of abuses, their liberties were best defended. It is not so; it is almost directly the contrary. If he means by aristocratic influence, borough influence, he talks idly; and if he means wealth, he expresses himself improperly: liberty was not best defended as the Commons. became an aristocratic power, but as an aristocratic wealth and feudal principality were alienated, melted, and diffused among the Commons: not as the Commons ceased to be Commons, but as great men became Commons by alienation, and small men became such by commerce-as the Commons grew in wealth the better to combat that aristocratic influence, and not as they themselves became a part of that influence and ceased to be Commons. To the aristocratic power which the patron of abuses would set up as the bulwark of freedom, must we attribute the fall of freedom and the catastrophe of kings. To this must we attribute the barons' war and five depositions; and to the diminution of that power are we to attribute the Bill of Rights and the Revolution, both carried in the Commons against the alterations and interpolations attempted by this aristocratic interposition and influence. It is true, though the power of the baron is gone, the influence of the borough patron remains; and therefore, though there is no civil war, there will continue to be faction. For wherever the powers of the constitution fall into the hands of an oligarchy, the Crown and the