ch such a right may by any mediums be exercised, or in effect
be indirectly acquired. Else it is very obvious that the intention of
the law in refusing that right might be entirely frustrated, and the
whole power of the legislature baffled. If there be no certain
invariable rule of eligibility, it were better to get simplicity, if
certainty is not to be had; and to resolve all the franchises of the
subject into this one short proposition--the will and pleasure of the
House of Commons.

The argument, drawn from the courts of law, applying the principles of
law to new cases as they emerge, is altogether frivolous, inapplicable,
and arises from a total ignorance of the bounds between civil and
criminal jurisdiction, and of the separate maxims that govern these two
provinces of law, that are eternally separate. Undoubtedly the courts of
law, where a new case comes before them, as they do every hour, then,
that there may be no defect in justice, call in similar principles, and
the example of the nearest determination, and do everything to draw the
law to as near a conformity to general equity and right reason as they
can bring it with its being a fixed principle. _Boni judicis est
ampliare justitiam_--that is, to make open and liberal justice. But in
criminal matters this parity of reason, and these analogies, ever have
been, and ever ought to be, shunned.

Whatever is incident to a court of judicature, is necessary to the House
of Commons, as judging in elections. But a power of making incapacities
is not necessary to a court of judicature; therefore a power of making
incapacities is not necessary to the House of Commons.

Incapacity, declared by whatever authority, stands upon two principles:
first, an incapacity arising from the supposed incongruity of two duties
in the commonwealth; secondly, an incapacity arising from unfitness by
infirmity of nature, or the criminality of conduct. As to the first
class of incapacities, they have no hardship annexed to them. The
persons so incapacitated are paid by one dignity for what they abandon in
another, and, for the most part, the situation arises from their own
choice. But as to the second, arising from an unfitness not fixed by
nature, but superinduced by some positive acts, or arising from
honourable motives, such as an occasional personal disability, of all
things it ought to be defined by the fixed rule of law--what Lord Coke
calls the Golden Metwand of the Law, a