p Burnet knew of
six thousand pounds which he had received at one payment. I believe the
payment of sums in hard money, plain, naked bribery, is rare amongst us.
It was then far from uncommon.

A triennial was near ruining, a septennial Parliament saved your
Constitution; nor, perhaps, have you ever known a more flourishing
period, for the union of national prosperity, dignity, and liberty,
than the sixty years you have passed under that constitution of
Parliament.

The shortness of time in which they are to reap the profits of iniquity
is far from checking the avidity of corrupt men; it renders them
infinitely more ravenous. They rush violently and precipitately on their
object; they lose all regard to decorum. The moments of profits are
precious; never are men so wicked as during a general mortality. It was
so in the great plague at Athens, every symptom of which (and this its
worse symptom amongst the rest) is so finely related by a great
historian of antiquity. It was so in the plague of London in 1665. It
appears in soldiers, sailors, &c. Whoever would contrive to render the
life of man much shorter than it is would, I am satisfied, find the
surest receipt for increasing the wickedness of our nature.

Thus, in my opinion, the shortness of a triennial sitting would have the
following ill effects: It would make the member more shamelessly and
shockingly corrupt; it would increase his dependence on those who could
best support him at his election; it would wrack and tear to pieces the
fortunes of those who stood upon their own fortunes and their private
interest; it would make the electors infinitely more venal; and it would
make the whole body of the people, who are, whether they have votes or
not, concerned in elections, more lawless, more idle, more debauched; it
would utterly destroy the sobriety, the industry, the integrity, the
simplicity of all the people, and undermine, I am much afraid, the
deepest and best-laid foundations of the commonwealth.

Those who have spoken and written upon this subject without doors do
not so much deny the probable existence of these inconveniences in their
measure as they trust for their prevention to remedies of various sorts
which they propose. First, a place bill. But if this will not do, as
they fear it will not, then, they say, We will have a rotation, and a
certain number of you shall be rendered incapable of being elected for
ten years. Then for the electors, they shall