The question is, whether this has
been always so, since the House of Commons has taken its present
shape and circumstances, and has been an essential operative part of
the Constitution; which, I take it, it has been for at least five
hundred years.
This I resolve to myself in the affirmative: and then another
question arises; whether this House stands firm upon its ancient
foundations, and is not, by time and accidents, so declined from its
perpendicular as to want the hand of the wise and experienced
architects of the day to set it upright again, and to prop and
buttress it up for duration;--whether it continues true to the
principles upon which it has hitherto stood;--whether this be de
facto the Constitution of the House of Commons as it has been since
the time that the House of Commons has, without dispute, become a
necessary and an efficient part of the British Constitution? To ask
whether a thing, which has always been the same, stands to its usual
principle, seems to me to be perfectly absurd; for how do you know
the principles but from the construction? and if that remains the
same, the principles remain the same.
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