It stands on
the journals. This secures to it a permanence which the author cannot
expect to any other work of his. Let it speak for itself to the present
age and to all posterity. The party had no concern in it; and it can
never be quoted against them. But in the late debate it was produced,
not to clear the party from an improper defence in which they had no
share, but for the kind purpose of insinuating an inconsistency between
the principles of Mr. Burke's defence of the dissolved Parliament and
those on which he proceeded in his late Reflections on France.
It requires great ingenuity to make out such a parallel between the two
cases as to found a charge of inconsistency in the principles assumed in
arguing the one and the other. What relation had Mr. Fox's India Bill to
the Constitution of France? What relation had that Constitution to the
question of right in an House of Commons to give or to withhold its
confidence from ministers, and to state that opinion to the crown? What
had this discussion to do with Mr. Burke's idea in 1784 of the ill
consequences which must in the end arise to the crown from setting up
the commons at large as an opposite interest to the commons in
Parliament? What has this discussion to do with a recorded warning to
the people of their rashly forming a precipitate judgment against their
representatives? What had Mr.
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