o 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."

Burke, in a speech which he delivered in his place in 1771, warned the
House of the evils of the course upon which they were entering, and
declared those to be their mortal enemies who would persuade them to
act as if they were a self-originated magistracy, independent of the
people, and unconnected with their opinions and feelings. But these
mortal enemies of its very constitution were at this time the majority
of the House. It was to no purpose that Burke argued with more than
legal closeness that incapacitation could not be a power according to
law, inasmuch as it had neither of the two properties of law: it was
not _known_, "you yourselves not knowing upon what grounds you will
vote the incapacity of any man;" and it was not _fixed_, because
it was varied according to the occasion, exercised according to
discretion, and no man could call for it as a right. A strain of
unanswerable reasoning of this kind counted for nothing, in spite of
its being unanswerable. Despotic or oligarchic pretensions are proof
against the most formidable battery that reason and experience can
construct against them. And Wilkes's exclusion endured until this
Parliament--the Unreported Parliament, as it was called, and in many
respects the very worst that ever assembled at Westminster--was
dissolved, and a new one elected (1774), when he was once again
returned for Middlesex, and took his seat.

The London multitude had grown zealous for Wilkes, and the town had
been harassed by disorder. Of the fierce brutality of the crowd of
that age, we may form a vivid idea from the unflinching pencil of
Hogarth. Barbarous laws were cruelly administered. The common people
were turbulent, because misrule made them miserable. Wilke