Charles Duke Yonge

“ In the Irish House of Commons, a member who, though a young man, had already established a very high reputation for professional skill as a barrister, for eloquence equally suited to the Bar and to the Senate, and for sincere and incorruptible patriotism, Mr. Plunkett, took upon himself to deny the competency of the Irish Parliament to pass a bill not only to extinguish its own existence, but to prevent the birth of any future Parliament, and to declare that the act, if it "should be passed," would be a mere nullity, and that no man in "Ireland would be bound to obey it." ”

“ They considered the Parliament of Great Britain as the great bulwark and security of their liberties and privileges, and always spoke of it with the utmost respect and veneration. They had given a practical proof of their goodwill by having raised, clothed, and paid during the last war nearly 25,000 men, and spent many millions; nor had any Assembly of any Colony ever refused duly to support the government by proper allowances from time to time to public officers. They had always been ready, and were ready now, to tax themselves. ”

“ To illustrate this position, Lord Lyndhurst said: "The sovereign may by his prerogative, if he thinks proper, create a hundred peers with descendible qualities in the course of a day. That would be consistent with the prerogative, and would be perfectly legal; but everybody must feel, and everybody must know, that such an exercise of the undoubted prerogative of the crown would be a flagrant violation of the principles of the constitution. In the same manner the sovereign might place the Great Seal in the hands of a layman wholly unacquainted with the laws of the country. ”

“ The master's counsel contended that slavery was not a condition unsanctioned by English law, for villeinage was slavery, and no statute had ever abolished villeinage. But the Chief-justice, in the first place, denied that villeinage had ever been slavery such as existed in the West Indies; and, in the second place, he pronounced that, whether it had been or not, it had, at all events, long ceased in England, and could not be revived. "The air of England has long been too pure for a slave, and every man is free who breathes it. ”

“ When there are three bodies so concerned in the legislation that the united consent of all is indispensable to give validity to any act, to claim for any one of them so paramount an authority that, even if it should adopt a manifestly mischievous course, neither of the others should have the right to control or check or correct the error, would be to make that body the irresponsible master of the whole government and nation ”

“ But, if such was the spirit in which an English historian could write of Ireland in the latter half of this present century, it may, perhaps, diminish our wonder at the conduct of our legislators in an earlier generation.
The penal laws on the subject of religion were also conceived and carried out in a spirit of extraordinary rigor and injustice. By far the larger portion of the Irish population still adhered to the Roman Catholic faith; but, as far as the negative punishment of restrictions and disabilities could go, its profession was visited as one of the most unpardonable of offences. ”

“ The entire abolition of a tax is not properly to be called a financial measure, that epithet belonging rather to those which aim at an augmentation of revenue by an increase in the number of contributors to a tax, while lessening the amount paid by each. But the abandonment of the tax in question should rather be regarded as a sacrifice of revenue for the instruction of the people in political knowledge; a price paid to enable and induce the poorer classes to take a well-instructed interest in the affairs of the state and the general condition of the country. ”

“ For what purpose, then, are arguments drawn from a distinction in which there is no real difference of a virtual and an actual representation? A member of Parliament chosen for any borough represents not only the constituents and inhabitants of that particular place, but he represents the inhabitants of every other borough in Great Britain. He represents the City of London and all the other Commons of the land, and the inhabitants of all the colonies and dominions of Great Britain, and is in duty and conscience bound to take care of their interests. ”

“ And he quoted a speech of Canning, delivered fifteen years before, in which that eloquent statesman, a man by no means inclined to a timorous policy, had declared that "no feeling of wounded pride, no motive of questionable expediency, nothing short of real and demonstrable necessity, should ever induce him to moot the awful question of the transcendental power of Parliament over every dependency of the British crown. That transcendental power was an ordinance of empire, which ought to be kept back within the penetralia of the constitution. It exists, but it should be veiled. ”

“ A really loyal servant should do nothing for which he is not prepared to answer, even though his master desires it. This practical responsibility is of the utmost advantage to the sovereign. Make independence, not subservience, the essential of service, and you compel the minister to keep his soul free toward the sovereign, you ennoble his advice, you make him staunch and patriotic, while time-servers, the submissive instruments of a monarch's extreme wishes and commands, may lead, and often have led, him to destruction. ”

“ It would be strange, indeed, when the questions submitted to the British Parliament and the decisions of that Parliament on them are so often of paramount importance to the whole world, if the Parliament should be the only body in the world denied the right of revising its own judgments, the only one whose first resolution is so irrevocable that even itself may not change or modify it. To rescind a recent vote is, no doubt, as Sir Robert Peel said, a step not wholly free from objection. ”

“ The rejection of a measure relating to taxation caused great excitement among a large party in the House of Commons—so violent, indeed, that the only expedient that presented itself to the Prime-minister, if he would prevent the proposal of some step of an extreme and mischievous character, was to take the matter into his own hands. Had he been able to act entirely on his own judgment, it may, perhaps, be thought that, with his sentiments on the inexpediency of the measure which had been rejected, he would have preferred a silent acquiescence in the vote of the Lords ”

“ Pitt that, "as the Colonies were not represented in Parliament, Great Britain had no legal right nor power to lay a tax upon them—that taxation is no part of the governing or legislative power. Taxes," said the great orator, "are the voluntary gift and grant of the Commons alone. In legislation the three estates of the realm are alike concerned; but the concurrence of the peers and the crown to a tax is only necessary to clothe it with the form of a law; the gift and grant is in the Commons alone.... The distinction between legislation and taxation is essentially necessary to liberty." ”

“ And the continued maintenance of this practice must be regarded farther as a proof that the English legislators had not yet learned to consider Ireland as an integral part of the kingdom, entitled in every particular to equal rights with England and Scotland. Indeed, it is impossible for any Englishman to contemplate the history of the treatment of Ireland by the English legislators, whether Kings, ministers, or Parliaments, for more than a century and a half, without equal feelings of shame at the injustice and wonder at the folly of their conduct. ”

“ Grattan's proposal was contrary to the laws of the realm and criminal in the extreme. "The crown of Ireland," as he told his hearers, "and the crown of England are inseparably united, and the Irish Parliament is totally independent of the British Parliament. The first of these positions is your security, the second your freedom, and any other language tends to the separation of the crowns or the subjection of your Parliament. The only security of your liberty is the connection with Great Britain; and gentlemen who risk breaking the connection must make up their minds to a union. ”

“ But the course which the British Parliament, after a long period of hesitation, has adopted respecting, not only the slave-trade, but the employment of slave-labor in any part of the British dominions, is so intimately connected with the great constitutional principle, that every man, whatever be his race or nation or previous condition, whose foot is once planted on British soil, is free from that moment, that it cannot be accounted a digression to mention the subject here. ”

“ For the next few years the history of the kingdom is one of progressive correction of abuses or defects. The King paid visits to Ireland and Scotland, parts of his dominions which his father had never once visited, and in both was received with the most exultant and apparently sincere acclamations. And, though one great calamity fell on the ministry in the loss of Lord Castlereagh—who, in a fit of derangement, brought on by the excitement of overwork, unhappily laid violent hands on himself—his death, sad as it was, could not be said to weaken or to affect the general policy of the cabinet. ”

“ It might have been considered almost as the assertion of a truism included in the power of granting supplies, to declare that the Parliament has the right and authority to examine into and correct abuses in the expenditure, if it had not been denied by more than one speaker on the ministerial side, though not by the Prime-minister himself. But that denial made the assertion of the right an imperative duty; for certainly the exclusive right of authorizing a levy of money would lose half its value, if unaccompanied by the other right of preventing the waste of the revenue thus raised. ”

“ There was now no such formidable enemy to be dreaded as the first Napoleon, but in every part of Europe affairs were in a state so unquiet that every kingdom seemed at times on the very brink of war; and since, if it should once break out, no one could feel confident that we should not be involved in it, or, if we should be, who would be our allies or our enemies, measures of precaution and self-defence seemed as needful now as they had been sixty years before. ”

“ The breaking out of the French Revolution, and the degree in which, in spite of all its atrocities and horrors, the revolutionary spirit for a time infected a large party in England, prevented Pitt from reviving the plan of Reform which he had framed with such care and genius for organization, and in which, though defeated in Parliament, both before and after he became minister, he had hitherto continued to cherish the hope of eventually succeeding. ”

“ The people, he maintained, had a right to discuss their grievances. "They had an inalienable right to complain by petition, and to remonstrate to either House of Parliament, or to the King; and to make two magistrates, who might be strong partisans, irresponsible judges whether anything said or done at a meeting had a tendency to encourage sedition, was to say that a free constitution was no longer suitable to us." ”

“ If the Parliament had the right to confer authority, it had clearly the right to limit the authority it conferred. If the Prince had an indefeasible right to the Regency, independently of the will of Parliament, then Parliament could have no pretence to limit or restrain the exercise of an authority which in no degree flowed from itself. Fox, indeed, took another objection to the imposing of limitations to the authority to be intrusted to the Regent, contending that this would be to create a power unknown to the constitution—a person in the situation of King without regal power. ”

“ The hereditary principle," he added, "is intwined in every part of our constitution; we in this House enjoy our hereditary rights in common with the crown; we mutually support and assist each other, and we form a barrier and defence to protect both those branches of the constitution against any by whom they may be assailed."
As Lord Granville had made the expediency of any measure the quality which, combined with legality, was sufficient to establish its constitutional character, he naturally labored this point with especial diligence. ”

“ On the great majority of subjects which come before Parliament, a member of Parliament, if he be a sensible and an honest man, has a far better opportunity of obtaining correct information and forming a sound opinion than can be within reach of any constituency, whose proneness to misjudge is usually in exact proportion to the magnitude of its numbers. Every elector justifiably may, and naturally will, seek to ascertain that between the candidate whom he supports and himself there is a general conformity of opinion; an absolute identity he will never find, and he has no right to ask. ”

“ A letter of the Prince Consort examines the principle of ministerial responsibility with so remarkable a clearness of perception and distinctness of explanation, that we may be excused for quoting it at length: "The notion that the responsibility of his advisers impairs the monarch's dignity and importance is a complete mistake. Here we have no law of ministerial responsibility, for the simple reason that we have no written constitution; but this responsibility flows as a logical necessity from the dignity of the crown and of the sovereign. ”

“ There is a frequent cry for a graduated income-tax; and surely if an unscrupulous demagogue in office were to contrive such a graduation as would subject a peer to three times the income-tax borne by a commoner, it would be a monstrous iniquity if the peers were to have no power of protecting themselves in their own House. ”

“ The law is above the King, and the crown as well as the subject is bound by it as much during the recess as in the session of Parliament; and therefore the wisdom of the constitution has excluded every discretion in the crown over a positive statute, and has emancipated Parliament from the royal prerogative, leaving the power of suspension, which is but another name for a temporary repeal, to reside where the legislative power is lodged—that is, in King, Lords, and Commons, who together constitute the only supreme authority of this government. ”

“ In the House of Peers he proposed that twenty-eight lords temporal of Ireland should have seats in the united Parliament, who should be elected for life by the Peers of Ireland—an arrangement which differed from that which, at the beginning of the century, had been adopted for the representative Peers of Scotland; but he argued, and surely with great reason, that "the choice of Peers to represent the Irish nobility for life was a mode that was more congenial to the general spirit and system of a Peerage than that of their being septennially elected, as the nobility of Scotland were." ”

“ But, while he thus showed his conviction that the permanent prosperity of the Irish Church was essential to the welfare of the kingdom, he was by no means insensible to the claims of the Roman Catholic Church (as founded not more in policy than in justice) to be placed in some degree on a footing of equality with it; not only by a recognition of the dignity of its ministers, but also by an endowment which should be proportioned to their requirements, and should place them in a position of worldly competence and comfort for which hitherto they had been dependent on their flocks. ”

“ Yet the century which has elapsed since the accession of George III. has also witnessed occurrences not only full of exciting interest at the moment, but calculated to affect the policy of the kingdom and the condition of the people, for all future time, in a degree only second to the Revolution itself. Indeed, the change in some leading features and principles of the constitution wrought by the Reform Bill of 1832, exceeds any that were enacted by the Bill of Rights or the Act of Settlement. ”

“ But he is not worthy of the name of statesman who conceives absolute rights and metaphysical distinctions to be the proper foundation for measures of government, and pays no regard to custom, to precedent, to the habits and feelings of the people to be governed; who, disregarding the old and most true adage, summum jus summa injuria, omits to take into his calculations the expediency of his actions when legislating for a nation which he is in the daily habit of weighing in his private affairs. The art or science of government are phrases in common use ”

“ The scheme which in the spring of 1834 they introduced to Parliament was the first instance of the adoption in this country of that system of centralization which has long been a favorite with some of the Continental statesmen, but which is not equally in harmony with the instincts of our people, generally more attached to local government. But, if ever centralization could commend itself to the English mind, it might well be when a new law and a new principle of action were to be introduced, in the carrying out of which uniformity of practice over the whole kingdom was especially desirable. ”

“ The sentiment that what was just or unjust in one place was just or unjust in every place; that a man's right to freedom did not depend on the country of his birth or the color of his skin, had naturally and logically been widely diffused and fostered by the abolition of the slave-trade. It was but a small step from admitting that there could be no justification for making a man a slave, to asserting that there was an equal violation of all justice in keeping one in slavery ”