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. Burke's opinion of the danger of
introducing new theoretic language, unknown to the records of the
kingdom, and calculated to excite vexatious questions, into a
Parliamentary proceeding, to do with the French Assembly, which defies
all precedent, and places its whole glory in realizing what had been
thought the most visionary theories? What had this in common with the
abolition of the French monarchy, or with the principles upon which the
English Revolution was justified,--a Revolution in which Parliament, in
all its acts and all its declarations, religiously adheres to "the form
of sound words," without excluding from private discussions such terms
of art as may serve to conduct an inquiry for which none but private
persons are responsible? These were the topics of Mr. Burke's proposed
remonstrance; all of which topics suppose the existence and mutual
relation of our three estates,--as well as the relation of the East
India Company to the crown, to Parliament, and to the peculiar laws,
rights, and usages of the people of Hindostan. What reference, I say,
had these topics to the Constitution of France, in which there is no
king, no lords, no commons, no India Company to injure or support, no
Indian empire to govern or oppress? What relation had all or any of
these, or any question which could arise between the prerogatives of the
crown and the privileges of Parliament, with the censure of those
factious persons in Great Britain whom Mr. Burke states to be engaged,
not in favor of privilege against prerogative, or of prerogative against
privilege, but in an open attempt against our crown and our Parliament,
against our Constitution in Church and State, against all the parts and
orders which compose the one and the other?

No persons were more fiercely active against Mr. Fox, and against the
measures of the House of Commons dissolved in 1784, which Mr. Burke
defends in that remonstrance, than several of those revolution-makers
whom Mr. Burke condemns alike in his remonstrance and in his book. These
revolutionists, indeed, may be well thought to vary in their conduct. He
is, however, far from accusing them, in this variation, of the smallest
degree of inconsistency.