A History of Parliamentary Elections and Electioneering in the Old Days: Showing the State of Political Parties and Party Warfare at the Hustings and in the House of Commons from the Stuarts to Queen VictoriaGrego, Joseph
History
A History of Parliamentary Elections and Electioneering in the Old Days: Showing the State of Political Parties and Party Warfare at the Hustings and in the House of Commons from the Stuarts to Queen Victoria
Grego, Joseph
Great Britain -- Politics and government; Great Britain. Parliament -- Election
“their former application to the throne having been
ineffectual, and new and exorbitant grievances being beyond
patient endurance. By the same secret and unhappy influence
to which all our grievances have been originally owing, the
redress of those grievances has been now prevented; and the
grievances themselves have been repeatedly confirmed; with
this additional circumstance of aggravation, that while the
invaders of our rights remain the directors of your Majesty’s
councils, the defenders of those rights have been dismissed
from your Majesty’s service--your Majesty having been advised
by your ministers to remove from his employment, for his vote
in Parliament, the highest officer of the Law (Lord Camden),
because his principles suited ill with theirs, and his pure
distribution of justice with their corrupt administration of
the House of Commons.
“We beg leave, therefore, again to represent to your Majesty
that the House of Commons have struck at the most valuable
liberties and franchises of all the electors of Great Britain;
and by assuming to themselves a right of choosing, instead
of receiving a member when chosen, and by transferring to
the representative what belonged to the constituent, they
have taken off from the dignity, and, we fear, impaired the
authority of Parliament itself.
“We presume again, therefore, humbly to implore from your
Majesty the only remedies which are in any way proportioned to
the nature of the evil; that you would be graciously pleased
to dismiss _for ever_ from your councils those ministers who
are ill-suited by their dispositions to preserve the principles
of a free, or by their capacities to direct the councils of
a great and mighty kingdom; And that by speedily dissolving
the present Parliament, your Majesty will show by your own
example, and by their dissolution, the rights of your people
are to be inviolable, and that you will never necessitate so
many injured, and, by such treatment, exasperated subjects, to
continue the care of their interests to those from whom they
must withdraw their confidence; to repose their invaluable
privileges in the hand of those who have sacrificed them; and
their trust in those who have betrayed it.
* * * * *
“We find ourselves compelled to urge, with the greatest
importunity, this our humble but earnest application, as
every day seems to produce the confirmation of some old, or
to threaten the introduction of some new injury. We have the
strongest reason to apprehend that the usurpation begun by the
House of Commons upon the right of electing, may be extended
to the right of petitioning, and that under the pretence of
restraining the abuse of this right, it is meant to bring into
disrepute, and to intimidate us from the exercise of the right
itself.”
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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