case was so bad
that they could only defeat Sir George Savile by a side-wind and a
scanty majority, carrying an amendment to defer any decision of the
matter till the next session. Sir George, however, was not discouraged;
he renewed his motion in 1769, when it was carried by a large majority,
with an additional clause extending its operation to the Colonies in
North America; and thus, in respect of its territorial rights, the crown
was placed on the same footing as any private individual, and the same
length of tenure which enabled a possessor to hold a property against
another subject henceforth equally enabled him to hold it against the
crown. The policy not less than the justice of such an enactment might
have been thought to commend it to every thinking man as soon as the
heat engendered by a party debate had passed away. It had merely placed
the sovereign and the subject on the same footing in respect of the
security which prescription gave to possession. And it might, therefore,
have been thought that the vote of 1769 had settled the point in every
case; since what was the law between one private individual and another,
and between the sovereign and a subject, might well have been taken to
be of universal application. But the ministry were strangely unwilling
to recognize such a universal character in the late act, and found in
the peculiar character of ecclesiastical bodies and ecclesiastical
property a pretext for weakening the force of the late enactment, by
denying the applicability of the principle to the claims of
ecclesiastical chapters. In 1772 Mr. Henry Seymour, one of the members
for Huntingdon, moved for leave to bring in a bill, which he described
as one "for quieting the subjects of the realm against the dormant
claims of the Church;" or, in other words, for putting the Church on the
same footing with respect to property which had passed out of its
possession as the crown had been placed in by the act of 1769. He
contended that such a bill ought to be passed, not only on the general
principle that possessors who derived their property from one source
ought not to be less secure than they who derived it from another, but
also on the grounds that, as ecclesiastical bodies occasionally used
their power, "length of possession, which fortified and strengthened
legal right and just title in every other case, did in this alone render
them more weak and uncertain," from the difficulty which often occurred
in