of the promoters of these laws may be described in the following words of Mr. Burke:[82]— “They who will not conform their conduct to the public good, and cannot now support it by the prerogative of the Crown, have adopted a new plan—they have totally abandoned the shattered and old-fashioned fortress of prerogative, and made a lodgement in the stronghold of Parliament itself. If they have any evil design to which there is no ordinary legal power commensurate, they bring it into Parliament; in Parliament the whole is executed from the beginning to the end; in Parliament the power of obtaining their object is absolute, and the safety of the proceeding perfect—no rules to confine, no after reckonings to terrify.[83] Parliament cannot with any great propriety punish others for things in which they themselves have been accomplices. Thus the control of Parliament upon the executive power is lost, and impeachment, that great guardian of the purity of the constitution, is in danger of being lost even to the very idea of it.” It must be confessed that the representatives of the people have been false to the people in allowing this surrender of the rights and liberties of any portion of them to be made in secret, and with that stealthy swiftness too clearly indicative of the fears of those who dared so to legislate. Ignorance and absence from the House have been pleaded by many members of Parliament as an excuse for their virtual complicity in this legislation. Their crime against the Constitution may be less than that of those who framed and watched over this legislation, but ignorance may not, any more than presumption, occupy the seat of our lawgivers.[84] Nevertheless our conviction is, that we shall ere long be able to reckon the Commons once more, as in times past, on the side of right and of constitutional freedom, as opposed to despotism; for we have this trust, that the Commons of England will yet be found faithful, and that the people’s representatives will once more prove themselves the champions and the guardians of our liberties and of our national honour. Were it not for this hope, were it not for the inestimable blessing of a comparatively pure representative system of government, and still more, were it not for our conviction of the love of virtue, freedom, and justice which lives and burns in the great heart of England’s humbler classes, to guide and inspire their representatives, our hearts might die within us as we contemplate the spectacle of the growing infidelity in high places to vital principles, and the audacious attempts to undermine our Constitution, for which attempts, if ignorance be the excuse, our case would be equally deplorable. Yet in spite of ignorance, infidelity, or selfish passion on the part of our rulers, we nevertheless retain that faith in the vigour and purity of English representative government which is breathed in the following noble words of De Lolme:[85]—