ctionaries should be regulated; and that the law of Quo Warranto
should be amended. It was evident that cautious and deliberate
legislation on these subjects must be the work of more than one
laborious session; and it was equally evident that hasty and crude
legislation on subjects so grave could not but produce new grievances,
worse than those which it might remove. If the committee meant to give a
list of the reforms which ought to be accomplished before the throne was
filled, the list was absurdly long. If, on the other hand, the committee
meant to give a list of all the reforms which the legislature would do
well to make in proper season, the list was strangely imperfect. Indeed,
as soon as the report had been read, member after member rose to suggest
some addition. It was moved and carried that the selling of offices
should be prohibited, that the Habeas Corpus Act should be made more
efficient, and that the law of Mandamus should be revised. One gentleman
fell on the chimneymen, another on the excisemen; and the House resolved
that the malpractices of both chimneymen and excisemen should be
restrained. It is a most remarkable circumstance that, while the whole
political, military, judicial, and fiscal system of the kingdom was thus
passed in review, not a single representative of the people proposed the
repeal of the statute which subjected the press to a censorship. It was
not yet understood, even by the most enlightened men, that the liberty
of discussion is the chief safeguard of all other liberties. [669]

The House was greatly perplexed. Some orators vehemently said that too
much time had already been lost, and that the government ought to be
settled without the delay of a day. Society was unquiet: trade was
languishing: the English colony in Ireland was in imminent danger of
perishing, a foreign war was impending: the exiled King might, in a few
weeks, be at Dublin with a French army, and from Dublin he might soon
cross to Chester. Was it not insanity, at such a crisis, to leave the
throne unfilled, and, while the very existence of Parliaments was
in jeopardy, to waste time in debating whether Parliaments should be
prorogued by the sovereign or by themselves? On the other side it was
asked whether the Convention could think that it had fulfilled its
mission by merely pulling down one prince and putting up another. Surely
now or never was the time to secure public liberty by such fences as
might effectually pr