freeholders the best judges with whom they shall trust their interests? Parliament was never supposed to have a right of revision but on contested elections. Still less is it proper or safe that a majority should have authority to expel a member duly chosen. If extended, that idea would go to a predominant party purging the House of all that are disagreeable to them. The danger to the Constitution is augmented when it is notorious that the majority is, of late years, almost always sold to the Court. There would be an end of Opposition, and consequently of liberty, if the Crown might garble the House of Commons at will. The difficulty increased to the Court on the present question, in that there was no one precedent directly in point. All that could be found, after the most intense search, were strained to make them depose in favour of expulsion. The case of my father, Sir Robert Walpole, in the reign of Queen Anne, came the nearest to that of Wilkes. He was expelled and imprisoned. The town of Lynn re-elected him, and he was again expelled--but then it was by the same Parliament, and not by a new one.[137] It was the more unfavourable, this precedent, that the persecution of my father was carried on in the days of, and by, a Jacobite Administration. Was that a precedent the House of Hanover ought to have adopted? It was not, however, the only precedent of a Stuart reign that was copied into the code of George the Third--nor the least obnoxious precedent that the present Court and its ductile House of Commons established on the present question; another being engrafted on it far less defensible, and of very dangerous example. But the reader must be conducted by regular steps to that strange proceeding, which, like other measures of the Reign, engendered more vexation to the Court than was compensated by its success.[138] On the day for fixing hearings of contested elections, Sir George Maccartney, who was returned from Russia, and had married Lord Bute’s second daughter, spoke for the first time, and with very bad success, though his parts had been much cried up. He was a young and handsome Irishman, attached to Lord Holland, with whose eldest son he had travelled as a kind of governor. He was an amiable man, with various knowledge, and singular memory, but no other extraordinary talents. He was now Secretary to the Lord-Lieutenant of Ireland, in the room of Lord Frederic Campbell, than whom there were few men who had more grievously offended the King; but the humiliations which his Majesty had brought on himself, obliged him at one time or other to employ or reward those most obnoxious to him.