tally regardless of the man or the merit." For instance,
Wilkes's annual motion to expunge the votes upon the Middlesex
election had been uniformly rejected, as often as it was made while
Lord North was in power. Lord North had no sooner given way to the
Rockingham Cabinet than the House of Commons changed its mind, and
the resolutions were expunged by a handsome majority of 115 to 47.
Administration was omnipotent in the House, because it could be a
man's most efficient friend at an election, and could most amply
reward his fidelity afterwards. Against this system Burke called on
the nation to set a stern face. Root it up, he kept crying; settle the
general course in which you desire members to go; insist that they
shall not suffer themselves to be diverted from this by the authority
of the government of the day; let lists of votes be published, so
that you may ascertain for yourselves whether your trustees have been
faithful or fraudulent; do all this, and there will be no need to
resort to those organic changes, those empirical innovations, which
may possibly cure, but are much more likely to destroy.

[Footnote 1: "Observations on State of the Nation," _Works_, i. 105,
b.]

[Footnote 2: "Speech on Duration of Parliaments."]

It is not surprising that so halting a policy should have given deep
displeasure to very many, perhaps to most, of those whose only common
bond was the loose and negative sentiment of antipathy to the court,
the ministry, and the too servile majority of the House of Commons.
The Constitutional Society was furious. Lord Chatham wrote to Lord
Rockingham that the work in which these doctrines first appeared,
must do much mischief to the common cause. But Burke's view of the
constitution was a part of his belief with which he never
paltered, and on which he surrendered his judgment to no man. "Our
constitution," in his opinion, "stands on a nice equipoise, with steep
precipices and deep waters upon all sides of it. In removing it from a
dangerous leaning towards one side, there may be a risk of oversetting
it on the other."[1] This image was ever before his mind. It occurs
again in the last sentence of that great protest against all change
and movement, when he describes himself as one who, when the equipoise
of the vessel in which he sails may be endangered by overloading it
upon one side, is desirous of carrying the small weight of his reasons
to that which may preserve its equipoise.[2] When w