think proper to call to his councils.' And Burke, in his 'short account' of his administration of 1765, had not only imputed both its formation and its dismissal to the 'express request' and 'express command of their royal master,' but in the sentence, 'they discountenanced and, it is to be hoped, forever abolished, the dangerous and unconstitutional practice of removing military officers for their votes in Parliament,' condemned with unmistakable plainness some acts of the preceding ministry which were universally understood to have been forced upon it by the King himself. General Conway had been deprived of the colonelcy of his regiment; Lord Rockingham himself, with several other peers, had been dismissed from Lord-lieutenancies, as a punishment for voting against the ministry; such dismissals being a flagrant attempt to put down all freedom of debate in Parliament, which of all its privileges is the one most essential to its usefulness, if not to its very existence. But, as Burke said, the practice had been abandoned, and the first resolution, therefore, as Lord North said, involved no practical result. It is the second resolution that confers a constitutional character and importance on this debate. And it is not too much to say that no vote of greater value had been come to for many years. 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.
It may likewise be said that another principle of the parliamentary constitution is, by implication, contained in Mr. Dunning's second resolution, and that the words, 'it is competent to this House to examine into and to correct abuses in the expenditure,' were meant to imply a denial of the competency of the other House to institute, or even to share in, such an examination. Even if that were the object of its framer, it only coincided with the view of the peers themselves, a very considerable majority[68] of whom had, a few weeks before, rejected a motion made by Lord Shelburne for the appointment of 'a committee of members of both Houses to examine without delay into the public expenditure,' principally on the ground urged by the Secretary of State, Lord Stormont, and by several other peers, that 'to inquire into, reform, and control the public expenditure' would be an improper interference with the privileges of the Commons; the Chief-justice, Lord Mansfield, even going the length of warning his brother peers that such interference might probably lead the Commons 'to dispute in their turn the power of judicature in the last resort exercised by the peers.' Lord Camden, on the contrary, affirmed, as a proposition which 'no noble lord present would deny, that that House had a right to inquire so far as the disposal of public moneys came under their cognizance as a deliberative body.' And in the Lower House itself, Burke, in his speech in favor of his Bill for Economical Reform, went even farther than Lord Camden, and blamed the House of Lords for rejecting Lord Shelburne's motion on such a ground. 'They had gone,' he said, 'farther in self-denial than the utmost jealousy of the Commons could have required. A power of examining accounts, of censuring, correcting, and punishing the Commons had never, that he knew of, thought of denying to the Lords. It was something more than a century ago that the Commons had voted the Lords a useless body. They had now voted themselves so.' And it would seem that the Lords themselves, to a certain extent, retracted this, their self-denying vote, when, before the end of the same session, they discussed Burke's Bill for Economical Reform, and passed it, though it was a money-bill, 'containing extraneous enactments,' and as such contravened one of their own standing orders which had been passed in the beginning of Queen Anne's reign, when the system of 'tacking,' as it was called, had excited great discontent, which was not confined to themselves. The propriety of rejecting the bill on that ground was vigorously urged by the only two lawyers who took part in the debate, the Chancellor, Lord Thurlow, and Lord Loughborough, whose object was avowedly thus to give a practical proof that the Lords 'had not voted themselves useless.' But even those who disregarded their advice fully asserted the right of the peers 'to exercise their discretion as legislators.' We have noticed this matter on a previous occasion. The privilege claimed by the Commons, both as to its origin and its principle, has been carefully examined by Hallam, who has pointed out that in its full exclusiveness it is not older than Charles II., since the Convention Parliament of 1660 'made several alterations in undoubted money-bills, to which the Commons did not object.'[69] And, though his attachment to Whig principles might have inclined him to take their part in any dispute on the subject, he nevertheless thinks that they have strained both 'precedent and constitutional analogy' in their assertion of this privilege, which is 'an anomaly that can hardly rest on any other ground of defence than such a series of precedents as establish a constitutional usage.' The usage which for two centuries was established in this case by the good-sense of both parties clearly was, that the Lords could never originate a money-bill, nor insert any clause in one increasing or even altering the burden laid by one on the people, but that they were within their right in absolutely rejecting one. But such a right has a tendency to lapse through defect of exercise; and we shall hereafter see that 'the disposition to make encroachments,' which in this matter Hallam imputes to the Commons, has led them in the present reign to carry their pretensions to a height which at a former period had been practically ignored by the one House, and formally disclaimed by the other.
It may be remarked that Mr. Dunning's success in carrying his first resolution did in itself, to a certain extent, disprove the truth of that resolution, since, if the influence of the crown had been such as he represented it, it must have been sufficient to insure its rejection. But that resolution, and a new statute, of which in a previous session he had been one of the principal promoters, are reckoned by Lord Stanhope as among the chief causes of the disgraceful riots of 1780. In the summer of 1778 he had seconded and supported with great eloquence the repeal of some of the penal statutes against the Roman Catholics which had been passed in the reign of William III. It was the first blow at that system of religious intolerance which for nearly a century had been one of the leading principles, as it had been also the chief disgrace, of the constitution; and it was passed with scarcely any opposition by both Houses. As, however, the statute which it repealed had been enacted before the Scotch Union, the repeal did not extend to Scotland, and it was necessary, therefore, to bring in a separate measure for that kingdom. But the intelligence that such a proceeding was in contemplation excited great wrath among the Scotch Presbyterians, who, in the hope of defeating it, established a Protestant Association for the defence of what they called the Protestant interest, and elected as its president Lord George Gordon, a young nobleman whose acts on more than one occasion gave reason to doubt the soundness of his intellect. Against any relaxation whatever of the restrictions on the Roman Catholics the Association sent up petitions to the House and to the King, couched in language the wildness of which was hardly consistent with the respect due to Parliament or to the sovereign. Apparently in the hope of mitigating its opposition, the Houses the next year passed an act, similar in principle, to relax some of the restrictions still imposed on Protestant dissenting ministers by some of the subscriptions which were required of them. But, as in the reign of Charles II., the Presbyterian hatred of the Roman Catholics was too uncompromising to be appeased in such a manner. And when Lord George found the House of Commons itself acknowledging the danger with which the constitution was threatened by the influence of the crown, he saw in their vote a justification for all his alarms, since he had adopted as one of his most settled opinions the belief that George III. was himself a Papist at heart; and, under the influence of this strange idea, he drew up a petition to Parliament which he invited all the members of the Association to accompany him to present. His summons was received with enthusiasm by his followers. The number who, in obedience to it, mustered in St. George's Fields, which he had appointed as the place of rendezvous, was not reckoned by any one at less than fifty thousand, and some calculations even doubled that estimate. Whatever the number may originally have been, it was speedily swelled by the junction of large bands of the worst characters in the metropolis, who soon began to display their strength by every kind of outrage. They commenced by attacking some of the Roman Catholic chapels, which they burnt; and, their audacity increasing at the sight of their exploits, they proceeded to assault the houses of different members of Parliament who had voted for the measures which had offended them. Because the Chief-justice, Lord Mansfield, had lately presided at a trial where a Roman Catholic had been acquitted, they sacked and burnt his house, and tried to murder himself. The magistrates, afraid of exposing themselves to the fury of such a mob, kept for the most part out of the way; and though the troops had been put under arms, and several regiments from the rural districts had been brought up to London in haste, the military officers were afraid to act without orders. Left to work their pleasure almost without resistance, the rioters attacked the different prisons, burnt Newgate and released all the prisoners, and made more than one attack on the Bank of England, where, however, fortunately the guard was strong enough to repel them. But still no active measures were taken to crush the riot. The belief was general that the soldiers might not act at all, or, at all events, not fire on rioters, till an hour after the Riot Act had been read and the mob had been warned to disperse; and no magistrate could be found to brave its fury by reading it. There seemed no obstacle to prevent the rioters from making themselves masters of the whole capital, had it not been for the firmness of the King himself, who, when all the proper authorities failed, showed himself in fact as well as in name the Chief Magistrate of the kingdom.[70] He summoned a Privy Council, and urged the members to
