Debates on the Embargo laid on Corn.--Party Tactics.--Walpole exerts himself to prevent Conway from resigning.--View of Lord Chatham’s Conduct. On the 11th of November the Parliament met. Lord Suffolk opposed the Address of the Lords, and the debate turned on the illegality of the late Act of Council that had directed the embargo; the Opposition censuring the Ministers for not having called the Parliament to that end. To urge that the necessity had been pressing, that the delay necessarily attendant on issuing writs, on assembling the members, on passing the Bill, would have wasted the time, while the merchants who had contracted to send corn abroad would have taken advantage of such protraction and sent away their corn--and thus the evil would not have been prevented by paying too scrupulous regard to forms--these reasons did not satisfy men who would have found greater fault if the evil had not been prevented. The Duke of Bedford was more moderate, but wished the Parliament had been assembled. Lord Chatham, for the first time of his appearing in that House, spoke with coolness, dignity, and art, declaring that if any man was personal to him, or revived stories past, he should take no notice of them. This seemed to check Lord Temple’s heat, who, though severe in arraigning, forbore invectives against Lord Chatham; but proposed (as Mr. Grenville did in the other House) to issue 200,000_l._ from the Treasury for the relief of the poor--a vain attempt at popularity, and deservedly ridiculed. Lord Northington, with great boldness and defiance, said, he disclaimed accepting any pardon for the part he had acted in advising the embargo, and held law-books cheap when weighed against such a crisis. For himself he had acted on a larger scale. He concluded with haranguing against disunion. Lord Temple reminded him that two years before, he had declared unanimity was destructive. Lord Mansfield, from aversion to Lord Chatham and his Chancellor Camden, was now the advocate of the Constitution. The Act of Council he maintained was illegal, though he said he would give no opinion as the case might come before him in judgment, many suits being commenced, he heard, against officers of the customs for detaining corn from exportation on the authority of the Council’s order. Prerogative! there was no such thing: the King could do nothing but by law; was only free from arrest for debt,--truths that were scandalous in the mouth of a man whose soul was sold to Despotism. Lord Camden answered with firmness, and with sharp irony, on the new Whiggism of the Chief Justice. Himself, he said, had always been Whig, and should continue so. If it was not yet in our laws, it ought to be so, that _Salus populi suprema lex_. If this Act was a stretch of prerogative, _it was but a tyranny of forty days_. This sentence drew much censure--ridiculously so. In every Government there is--must be--a supreme power to exert itself when evils are too mighty for the common