Critical and Historical Essays — Volume 1Macaulay, Thomas Babington Macaulay, Baron
History
Critical and Historical Essays — Volume 1
Macaulay, Thomas Babington Macaulay, Baron
English literature -- History and criticism; Great Britain -- History
give us are for our good.” These sentences contain, in fact, the whole
explanation of the mystery. The conflict of the seventeenth century
was maintained by the Parliament against the Crown. The conflict which
commenced in the middle of the eighteenth century, which still remains
undecided, and in which our children and grandchildren will probably be
called to act or to suffer, is between a large portion of the people on
the one side, and the Crown and the Parliament united on the other.
The privileges of the House of Commons, those privileges which, in
1642, all London rose in arms to defend, which the people considered
as synonymous with their own liberties, and in comparison of which they
took no account of the most precious and sacred principles of English
jurisprudence, have now become nearly as odious as the rigours of
martial law. That power of committing which the people anciently loved
to see the House of Commons exercise, is now, at least when employed
against libellers, the most unpopular power in the Constitution. If the
Commons were to suffer the Lords to amend money-bills, we do not believe
that the people would care one straw about the matter. If they were to
suffer the Lords even to originate money-bills, we doubt whether such
a surrender of their constitutional rights would excite half so much
dissatisfaction as the exclusion of strangers from a single important
discussion. The gallery in which the reporters sit has become a fourth
estate of the realm. The publication of the debates, a practice which
seemed to the most liberal statesmen of the old school full of danger to
the great safeguards of public liberty, is now regarded by many persons
as a safeguard tantamount, and more than tantamount, to all the rest
together.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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