These debates were tedious and unentertaining, and willingly I abridge them: totally omitted they could not be; they were the constituent ingredients of an inglorious reign, in which many of the most solemn questions that compose or touch the essence of our constitution were agitated--questions that will live in our law-books, when omitted in polished histories written for entertainment. These pages, therefore, will serve for a clue to writers on the laws, though they may not be so fortunate as to please the idle. I shall slightly mention some other bills that were discussed about the same time. Mr. Herbert,[78] a near relation of the Earl of Pembroke, and a young man of great fortune and good principles, proposed a bill to declare that expulsion did not imply incapacitation unless for certain crimes infamous by law. Doubts were started on what those crimes were. The House was strongly inclined to the bill: the Ministers pretended not to discountenance it--but the Jesuits of the Treasury, Dyson and Jenkinson, undermined it indirectly: the latter went so far as to engraft a clause on that bill calculated to secure the rights of freeholders, which would have made it an instrument of tyranny, and would have made expulsion or imprisonment total incapacity. Lord North affected to be struck by and to approve that juggle; but Lord Beauchamp, General Conway, and even the smooth courtier Lord Barrington, resisting, and the latter declaring that it was necessary to quiet the minds of the people, Lord North gave it up. The Cabal however clogged the bill with so many subtleties and contradictions, that Mr. Herbert abandoned it with indignation, and it was lost.[79]