Remarks on Treating, and Other Matters Relating to the Election of Members of Parliament, and on Some Recent Decisions of Committees of the House of ... of Parliament, & on Some Recent Decisions O - Softcover

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This historic book may have numerous typos and missing text. Purchasers can download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. Not indexed. Not illustrated. 1849. Excerpt: ... set at rest at once, and for ever. If those proceedings are to be investigated, let them be investigated then, or not at all. Should a Petition be presented, and then be withdrawn, before a Committee can be appointed, the law, as it now exists, may be left to take its course. But if the time for presenting a Petition is suffered to elapse, no inquiry into a former Election, on the presentation of a Petition against a subsequent return in the assertion of a private right, ought to be permitted. The power of Parliament can still be exercised for the public good, and upon public grounds. Constituencies may be disfranchised, and Members, if need be, expelled the House, though the private right to institute an inquiry into their conduct, if it ever existed, may have been defeated or lost. Thus, indeed, we should not again see on the trial of a Petition against an Election, the proceedings at a former Election for the first time investigated, and the merits of the one made to depend on the merits of the other. We should not again see Electors cheated of their representative, and a constituency virtually disfranchised, because the Member they had chosen laboured under a hidden disability, which it was not in their power to discover or detect. Such a doctrine, mischievous in its origin, and pernicious in its consequences, is subversive of every principle known to the Constitution. VI. The extent to which this doctrine may be pushed, and the consequences to which it may lead, were never more fully exemplified than during the last Session of Parliament. The proceedings before A.D. 1848. the second Cheltenham and the second Horsham Committees have already in part been noticed; but another question of far greater importance than any which has yet been considered cam...

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