“It is not for any light or common grievances that we presume thus repeatedly to interrupt your Majesty’s quiet with our complaints. It is not the illegal oppression of an individual; it is not the partial invasion of our property; it is not the violation of any single law of which we complain, but it is a violation which at one stroke deprives us of the only constitutional security of our Fortunes, Liberties, and Lives. “Your Majesty’s servants have attacked our Liberties in the most vital part; they have torn away the heart-strings of the Constitution, and have made those men our destruction, whom the laws have appointed as the immediate guardians of our Rights and Liberties. “The House of Commons, by their determination at the last election for this county, have assumed a power to overrule at pleasure the fundamental _Right of Election_, which the Constitution has placed in other hands, those of their Constituents, and from whence alone their whole authority is derived; a power by which the law of the land is at once overturned and resolved into the will and pleasure of a majority of one House of Parliament. And if this pretended power is exercised to the full extent of the principles, that House can no longer be a Representative of the people, but a separate body, altogether independent of them, self-existing, and self-elected. “These proceedings have totally destroyed the confidence of your Majesty’s subjects in one essential branch of the legislative power, and if that branch is chosen in a manner not agreeable to the laws and constitution of the kingdom, the authority of Parliament itself must suffer extremely, if not totally perish.” The remonstrance from which the above paragraphs are extracted was, together with a petition from the county of Kent, presented to His Majesty at St. James’s; both being received and handed to the lord of the bedchamber in waiting; _but no answer was returned_. The electors of the city of Westminster also drew up a similar “Address, Remonstrance, and Petition”--