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said, that the sons of such men wantonly gave up those liberties for which their fathers had risked so much, and that for the poor pretence of suppressing a few frauds in the collecting of the public revenues, which might easily have been suppressed without entering into any such dangerous measures. This is all I shall trouble you with at present; but so much I thought it was incumbent upon me to say, in order that I might enter my protest against the question now before us.

SIR ROBERT WALPOLE'S SPEECH ON THE SAME

SIR,

OCCASION.

As I was obliged, when I opened the affair now before you, to take up a great deal of your time, I then imagined that I should not have been under a necessity of giving you any further trouble; but when such things are thrown out, things which in my opinion are quite foreign to the debate; when the ancient histories, not only of this but other countries, are ransacked for characters of wicked ministers, in order to adapt them to the present times, and to draw parallels between them and some modern characters, to which they bear no other resemblance than that they were ministers, "it is impossible for one to sit still. Of late years I have dealt but little in the study of history; but I have a very good prompter by me, (meaning sir Philip Yorke) and by his means, I can recollect that the case of Empson and Dudley, mentioned by the honourable gentleman who spoke last, was

so very different from any thing that can possibly be presumed from the scheme now before us, that I wonder how it was possible to lug them into the debate. The case as to them was, that they had, by virtue of old and obsolete laws, most unjustly extorted great sums of money from people, who, as was pretended, had become liable to great pains and penalties, by having been guilty of breaches of those obsolete laws, which, for many years before, had gone entirely into disuse. I must say, and I hope most of those that hear me think, that it is very unjust and unfair to draw any parallel between the character of those two ministers and mine, which was, I suppose, what the honourable gentleman meant to do, when he brought that piece of history into the debate. If I ever endeavour to raise money from the people, or from any man whatever, by oppressive or illegal means, if my character should ever come to be in any respect like theirs, I shall deserve their fate. But while I know myself to be innocent, I shall depend upon the protection of the laws of my country. As long as they can protect me, I am safe; and if that protection should fail, I am prepared to submit to the worst that can happen. I know that my political and ministerial life has by some gentlemen been long wished at an end; but they may ask their own disappointed hearts, how vain their wishes have been; and as for my natural life, I have lived long enough to learn to be as easy about parting with it, as any man can well be.

As to those clamours which have been raised without doors, and which are now so much insist

ed on, it is very well known by whom and by what methods they were raised, and it is no difficult matter to guess with what views; but I am very far from taking them to be the sense of the nation, or believing that the sentiments of the generality of the people were thereby expressed. The most part of the people concerned in those clamours did not speak their own sentiments." They were played upon by others, like so many puppets; it was not the puppets that spoke, it was those behind the curtain that played them, and made them speak whatever they had a mind.

There is now a most extraordinary concourse of people at our door. I hope it will not be said that all those people came there of themselves naturally, and without any instigation from others, for to my certain knowledge some very odd methods were used to bring such multitudes hither. Circular letters were wrote, and sent by the beadles, in the most public and unprecedented manner, round almost every ward in the city, summoning them upon their peril to come down this day to the house of commons. This I am certain of, because I have now one of those letters in my pocket, signed by a deputy of one of the greatest wards in the city of London, and sent by the beadle to one of the inhabitants of that ward;' and I know that such letters were sent in the same manner almost to every liveryman and tradesman in that ward; and by the same sort of unwarrantable methods have the clamours been raised almost in every other part of the nation.

Gentlemen may say what they please of the multitudes now at our door, and in all the avenues

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leading to this house; they may call them a modest multitude, if they will; but whatever temper they were in when they came hither, it much altered now, may be very after having waited so long at our door. It may be a very easy matter for some designing seditious person to raise a tumult and disorder among them: and when tumults are once begun, no man knows where they may end. He is a greater man than any I know in the nation, that could with the same ease appease them. For this reason I must think, that it was neither prudent nor regular to use any methods for bringing such multitudes to this place, under any pretence whatever. Gentlemen may give them what name they think fit; it may be said, that they came hither as humble supplicants; but I know whom the law calls sturdy beggars, and those who brought them hither could not be certain but that they might have behaved in the same manner.

SPEECH OF SIR JOHN ST. AUBIN, FOR REPEALING THE SEPTENNIAL ACT. 1733.

MR. SPEAKER,

THE subject matter of this debate is of such importance, that I should be ashamed to return to my electors, without endeavouring, in the best manner I am able, to declare publicly the reasons which induced me to give my most ready assent to this question.

The people have an unquestionable right to frequent new parliaments by ancient usage; and

this usage has been confirmed by several laws, which have been progressively made by our ancestors, as often as they found it necessary to insist on this essential privilege.

Parliaments were generally annual, but never continued longer than three years, till the remark. able reign of Henry VIII. He, sir, was a prince of unruly appetites, and of an arbitrary will; he was impatient of every restraint; the laws of God and man fell equally a sacrifice, as they stood in the way of his avarice, or disappointed his ambition: he therefore introduced long parliaments, because he very well knew that they would become the proper instruments of both; and what a slavish obedience they paid to all his measures is sufficiently known.

If we come to the reign of king Charles the First, we must acknowledge him to be a prince of a contrary temper; he had certainly an innate love for religion and virtue. But here lay the misfortune- -he was led from his natural disposition by sycophants and flatterers; they advised him to neglect the calling of frequent new parliaments, and therefore by not taking the constant sense of his people in what he did, he was worked up into so high a notion of prerogative, that the commons (in order to restrain it) obtained that independent fatal power, which at last unhappily brought him to his most tragical end, and at the same time subverted the whole constitution. And I hope we shall learn this lesson from it, never to compliment the crown with any new or extravagant powers, nor to deny the people those rights, which by ancient usage they are entitled to; but

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