The
managers for the Commons must be supposed to have spoken on that subject
the prevalent ideas of the leading party in the Commons, and of the Whig
ministry. Undoubtedly they spoke also their own private opinions; and
the private opinions of such men are not without weight. They were not
_umbratiles doctores_, men who had studied a free Constitution only in
its anatomy and upon dead systems. They knew it alive and in action.
In this proceeding the Whig principles, as applied to the Revolution and
Settlement, are to be found, or they are to be found nowhere. I wish the
Whig readers of this Appeal first to turn to Mr. Burke's Reflections,
from page 20 to page 50,[13] and then to attend to the following
extracts from the trial of Dr. Sacheverell. After this, they will
consider two things: first, whether the doctrine in Mr. Burke's
Reflections be consonant to that of the Whigs of that period; and,
secondly, whether they choose to abandon the principles which belonged
to the progenitors of some of them, and to the predecessors of them all,
and to learn new principles of Whiggism, imported from France, and
disseminated in this country from Dissenting pulpits, from Federation
societies, and from the pamphlets, which (as containing the political
creed of those synods) are industriously circulated in all parts of the
two kingdoms.
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