CHAPTER XII.

Representation in Parliament. Fraud, venality, and corruption of the executive, legislative, and judiciary. Rotten boroughs. Record of infamy, on the Journals of the House of Commons.

WE have fully established the non-existence of lord Clarendon's golden age, under three great aspects,-freedom of religion, security of person, and security of property. We have proved it as fraudulent and false, as fraud and falsehood ever conspired to make any portrait. The fourth general head remains,—a fair representation in Parliament. To this we invite the reader's attention.

Under a free and independent Parliament, Ireland could not possibly have suffered the tithe of the oppressions of which the reader has had an indistinct bird's-eye view; but which, at full length, would fill folio volumes. There have been countries as much oppressed as Ireland; and tyrants as fell, and as fierce, and as rapacious as the deputies that swayed the sceptre there. But we know of no part of Europe that has experienced, for the same length of time, that is, for six hundred years, so grinding and hideous a despotism.

In a Parliament correctly constituted, the interests of the representatives would have been so completely identified with those of their constituents, that it would have been impossible to have subjected the exercise of the national religion to pains and penalties, at the will, as we have already said, of a paltry minority of two-thirteenths of the nation, at most; or to have enacted any of those barbarous statutes which rendered the legislation of Ireland, for centuries, an object of abhorrence and detestation.

We shall consider the subject of representation under four different heads:

I. The periods of the meeting of Parliament; II. The modes of election;

III. The manner of framing laws; and

IV. The freedom of debate.

And it cannot fail to appear, that, in this respect, Ireland was as flagrantly oppressed, as we have seen under the preceding heads.

I. Periods of Meeting.

From the twenty-ninth year of Elizabeth, anno 1587, to the fifteenth of Charles I. anno 1639, embracing a period of fifty-two years, there were but two Parliaments held in Ireland;-one in 1613, under James I.; and the other in 1634-5, under Charles I.243 Thus were the powers of legislation wholly suspended, in one instance, for twenty-six, and in another for twenty-one

243 Mountmorres, II. 175.

years. The legislative functions, in the mean time, were usurped and abused by the executive officers, who passed acts of state, which had all the efficacy of acts of Parliament, and were enforced by fine and imprisonment, as we have already shown.

From 1666 to 1692, there was another intermission of Parliaments in Ireland.* It thus appears, that out of a period of a little more than a century, there were above seventy years in which no Parliament was held. If, however, regard be had to the mode in which the elections for the Lower House were conducted, as shall be shown presently; to the kind of men who were returned; and to the complexion of a large portion of the laws they enacted, the intermission can hardly be considered as an evil. But to be freed from the abomination of a corrupt legislature, affords no proof of the non-existence of the enormous injustice resulting from the deprivation, for so long a period, of a fair and honest representation.

II. Modes of the election of members of the House of Commons.

On the original adjustment of representation in a legislative or deliberative body, it is fair to presume, on every principle of honour and ho

*"The fatal dissolution [took place] the 7th of August, 1666. This event was emphatically fatal, because it did not legally assemble, from this latter period, in Ireland, till 1692 "244

244 Mountmorres, II. 176.

nesty, that there ought to be a reasonable proportion observed between the constituents and their representatives. If a town with three thousand inhabitants has two representatives, one with six thousand ought to have four. These proportions, however, will be materially changed by time. One place will rise into consequence from a state of obscurity, and another sink from a state of eminence to obscurity; and justice requires that the representation should be occasionally modified accordingly. But so many persons are interested in the support of abuses, and those who are thus interested act so much in concert, that reformation is at all times extremely difficult: and we believe that in no country but the United States, and perhaps France, in some of the scores of constitutions which "fretted their short hour on the stage," during the French revolution, has there ever been provision made for periodical regulation of representation by Hence the borough system in England has gradually become the scourge of that nation, and the astonishment and disgust of the rest of the world.

census.

But the representation in Ireland had, in its origin, all the leprosy and ulceration which time has introduced, in a succession of ages, into that of England. To expose its hideous deformity naked to the eye of the reader, and to convince him that in every part of the government of that beloved, but thrice-wretched country, Ireland,

where I first drew my breath, and whose awful fate wrings my heart with distress, while I feebly sketch its wrongs, there was a systematic outrage on every principle of honour, honesty, and justice, I shall give him a view of the mode in which the elections were managed in three Parliaments the two first in 1560 and 1568, under the "Virgin Queen," (lucus a non lucendo) and the third in 1613, under the wise, unassuming, profound, and thrice-puissant prince, James I. the mirror and quintessence of perfection.

In the first Parliament held under Elizabeth, the base means resorted to, for the purpose of securing a majority, were of a unique character, without previous precedent, or subsequent example. Writs were issued to only ten of the nineteen counties then under the British government; and thus the remaining nine were disfranchised. The Parliament was composed of seventy-six members, of whom fifty-six were for towns and boroughs where the royal authority predominated the remaining twenty were for the

"In the House of Commons, we find representatives summoned for ten counties only. The rest, which made up the number seventy-six, were citizens and burgesses of those towns in which the royal authority was predominant. It is therefore little wonder, that, in spite of clamour and opposition, in a session of a few weeks, the whole ecclesiastical system of queen Mary was entirely reversed by a series of statutes, conformable to those already enacted in the English Parliament."245

245 Leland, II. 272.