‘A member of Parliament, gentlemen, to speak to you in your own phrase, is a sort of staple commodity, manufactured for home consumption. Much has been said of the improvement of machinery in the present age, by which one man may do the work of a dozen. If this be admirable, and admirable it is acknowledged to be by all the civilised world, how much more admirable is the improvement of political machinery, by which one man does the work of thirty thousand! I am sure I need not say another word to a great manufacturing population like the inhabitants of the city of Novote, to convince them of the beauty and utility of this most luminous arrangement. ‘The duty of a representative of the people, whether actual or virtual, is simply _to tax_. Now this important branch of public business is much more easily and expeditiously transacted by the means of virtual, than it possibly could be by that of actual representation. For when the minister draws up his scheme of ways and means, he will do it with much more celerity and confidence, when he knows that the propitious countenance of virtual representation will never cease to smile upon him as long as he continues in place, than if he had to encounter the doubtful aspect of actual representation, which might, perhaps, look black on some of his favourite projects, thereby greatly impeding the distribution of secret service money at home, and placing foreign legitimacy in a very awkward predicament. The carriage of the state would then be like a chariot in a forest, turning to the left for a troublesome thorn, and to the right for a sturdy oak; whereas it now rolls forward like the car of Juggernaut over the plain crushing whatever offers to impede its way. ‘The constitution says that no man shall be taxed but by his own consent; a very plausible theory, gentlemen, but not reducible to practice. Who will apply a lancet to his own arm, and bleed himself? Very few, you acknowledge. Who then, _a fortiori_, would apply a lancet to his own pocket, and draw off what is dearer to him than his blood—his money? Fewer still, of course; I humbly opine, none.—What then remains but to appoint a royal college of state surgeons, who may operate on the patient according to their views of his case? Taxation is political phlebotomy: the Honourable House is, figuratively speaking, a royal college of state surgeons. A good surgeon must have firm nerves and a steady hand; and, perhaps, the less feeling the better. Now, it is manifest that, as all feeling is founded on sympathy, the fewer constituents a representative has, the less must be his sympathy with the public, and the less, of course as is desirable, his feeling for his patient—the people:—who, therefore, with so much _sang froid_, can phlebotomise the nation, as the representative of half an elector?