hat of the people.

The arguments of the ministers were, no doubt, greatly recommended, both
to the Parliament and the people in general, by the notoriety of the
fact that foreign agents were in many of our large towns busily, and not
unsuccessfully, engaged in propagating what were known as Jacobin
doctrines. But, even without that aid, it was clear that every
government must, for the common good of all, be at times of
extraordinary emergency invested with the power of suspending laws made
for ordinary circumstances. And what would be an intolerable evil, if
the supreme magistrate took upon himself to exercise it, ceases to be
one when the right to exercise it is conferred by the nation itself in
Parliament. If the bill did, as was argued, suspend the _Habeas Corpus_
Act, that statute had been enacted by Parliament, and therefore for
Parliament, in a case of necessity, to suspend its operation was clearly
within the spirit of the constitution.

The bills affecting our own fellow-subjects were still more warmly
contested. One was known as the Traitorous Correspondence Bill, which,
according to Lord Campbell, was suggested by Lord Loughborough, who had
lately become Lord Chancellor. The old law of high-treason, enacted in
the reign of Edward III., had been in effect greatly mitigated by later
statutes, which had made acts to which that character was imputed more
difficult of proof, by a stricter definition of what was admissible
evidence, and other safeguards; and the practice of the courts had by
degrees practically reduced the list of treasons enumerated in the old
law, indictments for many of the offences contained in it forbearing to
assert that the persons accused had incurred the penalty of
high-treason. But this new bill greatly enlarged the catalogue. It made
it high-treason to hold any correspondence with the French, or to enter
into any agreement to supply them with commodities of any kind, even
such as were not munitions of war, but articles of ordinary merchandise,
or to invest any money in the French Funds; and it enacted farther that
any person who, by "any writing, preaching, or malicious and advised
speaking," should encourage such designs as the old statute of Edward
made treasonable, should be liable to the penalties of high-treason.

Another bill was designed to check the growing custom of holding public
meetings, by providing that no meeting, the object of which was to
consider any petition to the K