Parliament of England

“ That what his endeavours had been all along for the crushing of parliament, had been' notorious to the whole kingdom. "And truly, sir," he continued, "in that you did strike at all, for the great bulwark of the liberties of the people is the parliament of England. Could you but have confounded that, you had at one blow cut off the neck of England. But God hath been pleased to confound your design, to break your forces, to bring your person into custody, that you might be responsible to justice." ”

“ Few Parliaments have ever been more memorable, or more truly representative of the English people, than the Parliament of 1654. It was the first Parliament in our history where members from Scotland and Ireland sate side by side with those from England, as they sit in the Parliament of to-day. The members for rotten boroughs and pocket-boroughs had disappeared. ”

“ The country is with the parliament and against the king It is not merely parliament, much less the commons, still less this little knot of leading man—it is the people of England who no longer put any trust in the king, but who see alone in the seizure of the powers of the whole constitution, the guarantee for its preservation. ”

“ Now, my notion is, that every great measure can have only one real importance, by throwing weight into the scale of one or other of the two great Parliamentary parties. Do what you will,—agitate, write, speak, pamphleteer, and libel,—but all resolves itself to some question of a harm to one side and good to the other, the country the while being wonderfully little the better or the worse for all the legislation. We used to have a Constitution in England: we have now only got a Parliament, and to be anything in the nation a man must make himself felt there! ”

“ Ordinance by the few peers who remained brought about a fresh resolution from the members who remained in the Lower House, "that the People are, under God, the original of all just power; that the Commons of England in Parliament assembled—being chosen by, and representing, the People—have the supreme power in this nation; and that whatsoever is enacted and declared for law by the Commons in Parliament assembled hath the force of a law, and all the people of this nation are concluded thereby, although the consent and concurrence of the king or House of Peers be not had hereunto." ”

“ We have no longer the Commons of England humbly crouching, as it were, before the imperious barons, and scarcely daring to consider the benches they occupied at the lower end of the general Parliament as their own, but evidently feeling their real dignity and power; no longer confining themselves to voting away their own money, or meekly offering a petition of grievances, but exercising the daring functions of the public tribune, and calling to account the monarch through his ministers. ”

“ The Parliament of England is one of the most ancient of political institutions. Constitutional historians find its germs in the council of the wise men—"The Witenagemot"—which was summoned to give advice to the early Anglo-Saxon kings. In the thirteenth century Simon de Montfort had added to the assembly of the nobles certain representatives of the counties, cities, and boroughs. The monarchs found this gathering of the estates of the nation a useful instrument of taxation and the Parliament in turn acquired certain legislative rights. ”

“ Parliament will absolutely, with whatever effort, have to lift itself out of those deep ruts of donothing routine; and learn to say, on all sides, something more edifying than Laissez-faire. If Parliament cannot learn it, what is to become of Parliament? The toiling millions of England ask of their English Parliament foremost of all, Canst thou govern us or not? ”

“ England is the classic land of Parliamentary discussion, but even there, Parliament has only shown itself an admirable instrument, when broad issues were before the country. No one who has had his finger on the pulse of the machine, will say that it is a good, or anything but a detestable, instrument for the working out of schemes, which are good or bad, not according to the general conceptions, on which they are based, but according to the applicability to circumstances of a thousand detailed provisions. ”

“ Parliament was to continue for six months before dissolution, and everything for the present passed off quietly; the Civil List was voted as in the preceding reign; and on the 18th of September the King and his eldest son arrived in England. He was not a man to excite enthusiasm. An unostentatious man, used to a Court where his will was law, but where the manners were singularly primitive and plain, he was little suited to the peculiar position of an English Parliamentary sovereign, from whom, along with the possession of but little real power, much dignity and some magnificence were required. ”

“ They believe that the people of England will compel Parliament to do something.”
8“There are Members in both Houses that know these things, why do they not speak?–if it was reasonable to do so.”
“Squire, they dare not. They have not the power, even if they had the will. The Peers and the great Landlords own two-thirds of the House of Commons. They own their boroughs and members, just as they own their parks and cattle. One duke returns eleven members; another duke returns nine members; and such a city as Manchester cannot return one! ”

“ The majority of the British Parliament, made up of the three united parliaments of England, Scotland, and Ireland, determines the headship, the quality, and policy of the ministry, and determines it largely on considerations arising out of British domestic politics. ”

“ Many of these instances of command and obedience are collected by MR. LEIGH in his Report to the Virginia Legislature in 1812. The British Parliament was the great model upon which our statesmen framed our constitutions, and with its principles and history they always evinced an astonishing familiarity. We cannot suppose them ignorant of this great and obvious principle—a principle, beyond all question, of much more doubtful propriety in England then, and even now, than it can ever be in this country; because in England a few places elect representatives for the whole body of the people. ”

“ In England, the authority of the king, in all the exterior forms of government, and in the common style of law, appears totally absolute and sovereign; nor does the real spirit of the constitution, as it has ever discovered itself in practice, fall much short of these appearances. The parliament is created by his will; by his will it is dissolved. It is his will alone, though at the desire of both houses, which gives authority to laws. To all foreign nations, the majesty of the monarch seems to merit sole attention and regard. ”

“ Can Parliament be so dead to its dignity and its duty as to be thus deluded into the loss of the one and the violation of the other? To give an unlimited credit and support for the steady perseverance in measures not proposed for our parliamentary advice, but dictated and forced upon us—in measures, I say, my Lords, which have reduced this late flourishing empire to ruin and contempt! "But yesterday, and England might have stood against the world: now none so poor to do her reverence." I use the words of a poet; but, though it be poetry, it is no fiction. ”

“ Is not England a standing witness to the truth of your ideas? The King with his Parliament is legislator, as in France with his Council. The rest of the nation is governed according to municipal laws, as sacred as those of Parliament itself. ”

“ So far as England is concerned, the institution of an executive regularly elected by the legislature at large in place of a cabinet formed of the leaders of a party majority would be substantially a return to the old form of government—the Privy Council. Parliament is now the sovereign power, and election by it would be equivalent to the ancient nomination by the crown. The mode of electing and confirming a Speaker shows how the forms of monarchy may be reconciled with the action of an elective institution. ”

“ The new constitution breathed, in fact, a perfectly different spirit from the old one. The vitality of our former government was drawn from the higher classes and the lower ones. An election for Westminster was not merely the return of two members to Parliament: it was a manifestation of the feeling prevalent amongst the masses throughout England; and the feeling amongst the masses had a great influence in moments of excitement, and in all matters touching the national dignity and honour. ”

“ They believed it to be still in their power to regenerate England. The House of Commons declared England to be a Commonwealth, 'without a king or House of Lords,' and, taking the name of Parliament for itself, appointed forty-one persons to be a Council of State, charged with the executive government, and renewed annually. ”

“ There was only one way by which king and people could thus come face to face—Henry must summon to Westminster a Parliament to discuss those matters with him, and it must be a Parliament not made up of bishops and barons only; all England must be represented. ”

“ It became an accepted principle that royal officials were responsible to Parliament for their actions, that the king himself might be deposed for good cause, and that bills, when passed by Parliament and signed by the king, were the law of the land. England thus worked out in the Middle Ages a system of parliamentary government which nearly all civilized nations have held worthy of imitation. ”

“ In our time a body of men who hate England more than they love Ireland have, of set purpose, tumbled parliament into the dust: now, if a capable and firm authority were entrusted for twelve months with exceptional yet absolute control over parliamentary procedure, does any sane person suppose that the English passion for free parliaments would be lulled to sleep? Rule has often to be cruel in order to be kind. ”

“ The same breath which gave a decree of religious liberty, annihilated every other liberty, and made the whole nation dependent on the will of one man. But whilst thus sweeping away all the labours of all past parliaments at his pleasure, he, with an inconsistency which betrayed a secret feeling that the power of parliament was not so easily set aside, even then contemplated calling parliament together if he could have but a prospect that it would confirm what he had done in Scotland, and proposed immediately to do in England. ”

“ In France, the parliament soon became a mere engine in the hands of a few high-born and ambitious men, who had nothing in common with its interests, which were those of the people. In England, the House of Commons was a powerful body, sufficing to itself, and whose members had common cause in the privileges for which they contended. ”

“ And so it is necessary that all things which are to be affirmed or cancelled, granted' or denied, or done by the parliament, should be granted by the commonality of the parliament, which consists of the three grades or divisions of parliament: viz. of the representatives of the clergy, the knights of the shires, the citizens and burgesses, who represent the whole commonality of England; and not by the magnates. For each of them is in parliament for his own person alone, and not for any one else. ”

“ If the parliament were worsted, then must England sink to the level of the rest of the king-ridden nations. On the part of the king, his adherents joined him on his solemn engagement to maintain the protestant religion, and to claim nothing but his rightful prerogative; on the part of the parliament, an avowal as solemn was, that they fought not against the king, but for him and his crown, as well as the liberties and privileges of the people, which were endangered by the evil counsellors of the king. ”

“ In broadening the basis of taxation, he was led to broaden the basis of Parliament; and thus he advanced from the feudal conception of a Commune Concilium, attended only by Crown tenants, to the nobler ideal of a national Parliament containing representatives of every community and every class in England. The composition of the great council was altered; the principle of representation known for centuries before the Conquest in English local government, now found a home, and, as it proved, a permanent home, in the English Parliament. ”

“ The king doth will and command, and it is assented in the parliament, by the prelates, lords and commons, that all and singular persons and commonalties, which from henceforth shall have the summons of the parliament, shall come from henceforth to the parliaments in the manner as they are bound to do, and have been accustomed within the realm of England of old times. ”

“ The rule of Parliament has meant in England government by parties; and whatever be the merits of party spirit in a free, self-governed country, its calamitous defects, when applied to the administration of a dependency, are patent. ”

“ Under Charles the Second England had seen a Parliament, which had been returned in a moment of reaction, maintained without fresh election for eighteen years. A Triennial Bill which limited the duration of a Parliament to three was passed with little opposition, but fell before the dislike and veto of William. To counteract the influence which a king might obtain by crowding the Commons with officials proved a yet harder task. A Place Bill, which excluded all persons in the employment of the State from a seat in Parliament, was defeated, and wisely defeated, in the Lords. ”

“ Wherein does the transition from representation to full responsibility consist? It came about in England when Parliament, instead of merely being consulted by the sovereign, felt itself strong enough to give orders to the sovereign. ”