no power to pass an incapacitating vote either against Wilkes or
anybody else. An Act of Parliament is the least instrument by which
such incapacity could be imposed. The House might perhaps expel
Wilkes, but it could not 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 t