each House, there was an end of the argument of the right honourable gentleman that the subsequent assent in 1789 to certain bills, sanctioned the commission given by the two Houses; and that they could entertain bills without any commission at all, was implied in the whole of the proceeding which he himself recommended. The other argument of the right honourable gentleman to this point was still more inconclusive; he went so far as to say, that the Resolution having been agreed to by both Houses, and the King, after his recovery having, in the speech of his commissioners, thanked the Houses for the additional proof they had given of attachment to his person, it was to be inferred that the resolution had thus received the assent of all the three branches of parliament. If this had any meaning, the argument was this, that the expression in the King's speech echoed by the addresses, should be considered as having ratified, by the voice of the three branches assembled in parliament, the irregular proceedings of the two Houses in their preceding irregular assembly. It was the first time that the King's speech and its address were stated to have the character and efficacy of an act of parliament; if a ratification or an indemnity had been required, that was surely no act of ratification and indemnity; but assuming, as the right honourable gentleman assumed by his argument, that the proceedings stood in need of such confirmation, the true inference was, that, as there had been no indemnity granted and no ratification passed, those proceedings were left and still remained in all their original irregularity. Though the precedent of 1788, however, could not be argued as high as the Chancellor of the Exchequer wished to raise it; though it was not a precedent in full parliament, it was certainly, in point of form, a precedent for the two Houses assembled in the peculiar circumstances of their present situation. As such, it stands in opposition to that of the Revolution; and it was for the Committee to weigh and compare them together; to compare a precedent, to the form of which no objection was urged at the time by those who most disliked its substance, which had been stamped with the sanction of

an approving posterity, to which no objection in point of principle could even now be stated, with another precedent which at the time and ever since had been condemned by high parliamentary authorities, and which was liable to the strongest objections both from express laws and from constitutional principles.

The statute of the 13th of Charles II. made it a præmunire to maintain, that both Houses of Parliament, or either, had a legislative power without the king: yet the object of this Resolution was, to assume a legislative power by the two Houses without the king. That statute was levelled at the doctrines as well as the conduct of the Long Parliament; nor since the time of that parliament, had such doctrine and such language been heard within these walls, as the ministers had this day used to serve the purpose of the day. The Long Parliament, indeed, did not scruple to make a Great Seal for themselves; to justify the measure, they resorted to many of the topics which had been urged this day; their antiquarian pamphleteer Prynne used and perverted his toilsome industry and obscure erudition, in an argument for the parliament; and some of the expressions which fell from the Chancellor of the Exchequer seemed to have been taken from the title of Prynne's pamphlet, which is, That the Great Seal attends the Parliament. In speaking of the Long Parliament, he wished not to be misunderstood, or to be supposed deficient in veneration for those able patriots, who, in the commencement of the struggle, disappointed as it was in the end, and stained by lawless ambition and atrocious violence, had stood forth to vindicate our just liberties, and to bring delinquents to condign punishment. The flight of King Charles to York, and his stealth of the Great Seal, justified their subsequent step; it was justified by the necessities of the state, which must over-rule other considerations; but let not those, who neither have the necessities of the Long Parliament to plead, nor are actuated by their constitutional principles, imitate their usurpation where there is no similar necessity, and borrow their language and arguments to give practical effect to principles of a very different description. Besides the evidence, which

the statute of Charles II. afforded, of the great doctrine of the law, that there is no legislative power in the Houses of Parliament without the king, there were express acts of parliament which prescribed the mode, and prohibited every other, of giving the royal assent to bills passed by the two Houses. The 33d of Henry VIII., chapter 21, declares, that the king's assent by his letters patent, notified in his absence to both Houses assembled together in the upper chamber of parliament, is of the same force as if personally and publicly declared by himself; but the letters must not only be under his Great Seal, but they must be signed with his own hand. The act of the first year of Philip and Mary respecting the attainder of the Duke of Norfolk, which is a public statute, contains a still more explicit declaration of the law, that letters patent for giving the royal assent to bills have no validity or efficacy, unless signed with the king's own hand, as well as passed under the Great Seal. The commission, under which the royal assent was pretended to be given, on the last day of Henry the Eighth's life, to the bill for attainting the Duke of Norfolk, had the Great Seal in due form; it had also the king's name affixed by a stamp: but at the time these forms were gone through, King Henry was insensible and incapable of attending to public business. In the first year of Philip and Mary, after an inquiry into the transaction respecting this commission, and upon a confession of these circumstances before the House of Commons by Lord Paget, who had been King Henry's Secretary of State at the time, parliament removed the attainder; not in the ordinary form, by a bill to reverse the act of attainder, but, which is most material in the present argument, by a bill declaring that act to have been void from the beginning, expressly for want of the royal assent in due form. Before this proceeding took place in parliament, a question had been raised in Westminster Hall, whether that act of attainder could be regarded even there as a perfect statute, on account of the manner in which the assent had been given. The Solicitor-General, who had called so loudly for references to the law books, would find in Sir James Dyer's Reports that the question was much debated

among the justices, in a suit between the duke and certain purchasers of some of his forfeited estates; and although the judicial determination of the point was superseded by the parliamentary reversal, it might be well for the learned gentleman to consider, whether to his mind the existence of such a judicial doubt ought not to hold good as an argument against proceeding to make a regent by a bill in the manner proposed, lest the justices hereafter might take it into debate whether a bill assented to by the phantom were a perfect statute.

But how strong soever the reasons against such a proceeding might be thought, founded upon the express statute law of the land, it was still more strongly condemned by the essential first principles of the constitution of the monarchy. It was a proposal to break down and confound all the boundaries of legislative authority, as distributed among the three independent branches of parliament; to usurp the legislative power of the crown; and, by a gross and illegal fiction, to steal the semblance of an assent where there could be no negative, with the absurdity of affecting to sanction by the royal assent itself, the remedy made necessary by the incapacity of the King to assent to any thing. Such was the measure, which the Committee were called upon to prefer to the direct and clear precedent of the Revolution. They had to choose between a contrivance, the purpose of which, though denied, was palpable; a fiction, which could only be executed by a parliamentary falsehood and fraud, which must be attended with indefinite delay, which would involve their proceedings in a maze of complex and inconsistent forms; the invention, it was well known, of a refining lawyer, more addicted to scholastic subtilties and the caprices of ingenuity, than remarkable for enlargement of mind: they had to choose between this, and the explicit, plain, prompt course adopted at the Revolution, by the best of our ancestors at the best æra of our history, a precedent formed by statesmen of much experience and large views, and by lawyers, who, with all the learning of their profession, were found no unequal associates

to such statesmen.

II. CORN LAWS.

13th and 16th May, 1814.

(Vol. II. p. 160.)

THE House having resumed the consideration of a report respecting the Corn Laws, the Chancellor of the Exchequer (Mr. Vansittart) said, "He was of opinion that some of the resolutions that had been proposed would require further deliberation, and he should wish the subject, so far as related to them, to be postponed: but so convinced was he of the propriety of the resolution for allowing an unrestrained export, that he should be unwilling to postpone it for a single day." After some other members had spoken,

Mr. HORNER rose, and said: He thought that when the House came to consider the other resolutions, it would see the propriety of pausing, at least for some time, before it went to a decision on so very important a measure; he wished that, once for all, the House would now decide on the interest by which those were actuated who opposed the resolutions. The real interests of the consumer and of the landlord were one and the same. But what did the committee profess to do? Why to raise the price to the consumer- (a member called out No! no!). He would ask whether the honourable member for the Queen's County (Sir H. Parnell) had not acknowledged this on a former occasion; and if the honourable member who favoured him with the interruption took pains to inquire, he would find it was so. The necessary effect of the measure was permanently to increase the price of corn. He approved, however, of some parts of the view which his right honourable friend the Chancellor of the Exchequer had taken of the question.

[The first resolution was agreed to, and a bill to permit the exportation of corn from any part of the United Kingdom, without payment of duty or receiving of bounty, was ordered