either legally or with regard to the less definite limits of constitutional morality, decide whom the Middlesex freeholders should not elect, and it could not therefore set aside their representative, who was then free from any disabling quality.  Lord Camden did not much exaggerate, when he declared in a debate on the subject in the House of Lords, that the judgment passed upon the Middlesex election had given the constitution a more dangerous wound than any which were given during the twelve years’ absence of Parliament in the reign of Charles I. The House of Commons was usurping another form of that very dispensing power, for pretending to which the last of the Stuart sovereigns had lost his crown.  If the House by a vote could deprive Wilkes of a right to sit, what legal or constitutional impediment would there be in the way, if the majority were at any time disposed to declare all their most formidable opponents in the minority incapable of sitting?

In the same Parliament, there was another and scarcely less remarkable case of Privilege, “that eldest son of Prerogative,” as Burke truly called it, “and inheriting all the vices of its parent.”  Certain printers were accused of breach of privilege for reporting the debates of the House (March, 1771).  The messenger of the serjeant-at-arms attempted to take one of them into custody in his own shop in the city.  A constable was standing by, designedly, it has been supposed, and Miller, the printer, gave the messenger into his custody for an assault.  The case came on before the Lord Mayor, Alderman Wilkes, and Alderman Oliver, the same evening, and the result was that the messenger of the House was committed.  The city doctrine was, that if the House of Commons had a serjeant-at-arms, they had a serjeant-at-mace.  If the House of Commons could send their citizens to Newgate, they could send its messenger to the Compter.  Two other printers were collusively arrested, brought before Wilkes and Oliver, and at once liberated.

The Commons instantly resolved on stern measures.  The Lord Mayor and Oliver were taken and despatched to the Tower, where they lay until the prorogation of Parliament.  Wilkes stubbornly refused to pay any attention to repeated summonses to attend at the bar of the House, very properly insisting that he ought to be summoned to attend in his place as member for Middlesex.  Besides committing Crosby and Oliver to the Tower, the House summoned the Lord Mayor’s clerk to attend with his books, and then and there forced him to strike out the record of the recognisances into which their messenger had entered on being committed at the Mansion House.  No Stuart ever did anything more arbitrary and illegal.  The House deliberately intended to constitute itself, as Burke had said two years before, an arbitrary and despotic assembly.  “The distempers of monarchy were the great subjects of apprehension and redress in the last century.  In this, the distempers of Parliament.”