er cannot be a good guardian of public liberty. A man who derives
his subsistence from the taxes cannot be trusted to check the public
expenditure. You will never have purity, you will never have economy,
till the stewards of the nation are independent of the Crown, and
dependent only on their constituents. Yes; all this sounded well: but
what man of sense now doubts that the effect of a law excluding all
official men from this House would have been to depress that branch of
the legislature which springs from the people, and to increase the
power and consideration of the hereditary aristocracy? The whole
administration would have been in the hands of peers. The chief object
of every eminent Commoner would have been to obtain a peerage. As
soon as any man had gained such distinction here by his eloquence and
knowledge that he was selected to fill the post of Chancellor of the
Exchequer, Secretary of State, or First Lord of the Admiralty, he would
instantly have turned his back on what would then indeed have been
emphatically the Lower House, and would have gone to that chamber in
which alone it would have been possible for him fully to display his
abilities and fully to gratify his ambition. Walpole and Pulteney, the
first Pitt and the second Pitt, Fox, Windham, Canning, Peel, all the men
whose memory is inseparably associated with this House, all the men of
whose names we think with pride as we pass through St Stephen's Hall,
the place of their contentions and their triumphs, would, in the vigour
and prime of life, have become Barons and Viscounts. The great conflict
of parties would have been transferred from the Commons to the Lords.
It would have been impossible for an assembly, in which not a single
statesman of great fame, authority, and experience in important affairs
would have been found, to hold its own against an assembly in which
all our eminent politicians and orators would have been collected. All
England, all Europe, would have been reading with breathless interest
the debates of the peers, and looking with anxiety for the divisions of
the peers, while we, instead of discussing high questions of state, and
giving a general direction to the whole domestic and foreign policy
of the realm, should have been settling the details of canal bills and
turnpike bills.

The noble lord, the Member for Kent does not, it is true, propose so
extensive and important a change as that which the authors of the Act of
Settlem