plan, to specify any temporary incapacity; and that you could not, without a spirit of prophecy, have specified the disability of a private individual, subsequent to the period at which you wrote. What your plan was, I know not; but what it should have been, in order to complete the work you have given us, is by no means difficult to determine. The incapacity, which you call temporary, may continue seven years; and though you might not have foreseen the particular case of Mr. Wilkes, you might and should have foreseen the possibility of such a case, and told us how far the House of Commons were authorized to proceed in it by the law and custom of parliament. freeholders of Middlesex would then have known what they had to trust to, and would never have returned Mr. Wilkes, when Colonel Luttrell was a candidate against him. They would have chosen some indifferent person, rather than submit to be represented by the object of their contempt and detestation. The YOUR attempt to distinguish between disabilities which affect whole classes of men, and those which affect individuals only, is really unworthy of your understanding. Your Commentaries had taught me that, although the instance in which a penal law is exerted be particular, the laws themselves are general. They are made for the benefit and instruction of the public, though the penalty falls only upon an individual. You cannot but know, Sir, that 1 that what was Mr. Wilkes's case yesterday, may be yours or mine to-morrow; and that, consequently, the common right of every subject of the realm is invaded by it. Professing, therefore, to treat of the constitution of the House of Commons, and of the laws and customs relative to that constitution, you certainly were guilty of a most unpardonable omission, in taking no notice of a right and privilege of the house, more extraordinary and more arbitrary than all the others they possess put together. If the expulsion of a member, not under any legal disability, of itself creates in him an incapacity to be elected, I see a ready way marked out, by which the majority may, at any time, remove the honestest and ablest men who happen to be in opposition to them. To say, that they will not make this extravagant use of their power, would be a language unfit for a man so learned in the laws as you are. By If the expulsion, &c.-creates-] The moods of verbs express the generic distinctions of potentiality. None of these is more remarkable than that which subsists between power actually existent, and power only possible; the former signified in the indicative mood, the latter in the subjunctive. But, of this truth, English writers in general appear, if we may judge from their practice, to be utterly ignorant, or scornfully careless. Our grammarians dis- / tinguish a subjunctive mood: but, our writers employ the form of the indicative, indifferently, also for the subjunctive. JÚNIUS uses here, creates of the indicative, instead of the subjunctive create. He uses, elsewhere, are for be. And, in general, though in other respects the most correct in stile, perhaps, of all our writers, he uses always the forms of the indicative, to signify as well possible as actually existing power. In this, I cannot advise the reader to imitate him. your your doctrine, Sir, they have the power; and laws, you know, are intended to guard against what men may do, not to trust to what they will do. UPON the whole, Sir, the charge against you is of a plain, simple nature: it appears even upon the face of your own pamphlet. On the contrary, your justification of yourself is full of subtlety and refinement, and in some places not very intelligible. If I were personally your enemy, I should dwell, with a malignant pleasure, upon those great and useful qualifications which you certainly possess, and by which you once acquired, though they could not preserve to you, the respect and esteem of your country; I should enumerate the honours you have lost, and the virtues you have disgraced: but having no private resentments to gratify, I think it sufficient to have given my opinion of your public conduct, leaving the punishment it deserves to your closet and to yourself. JUNIUS. To your closet and to yourself.] I am afraid, that the use of the closet in this place, cannot be called happy. Not that a specious defence of the figure might not be found. But, after the ardour and majesty of the former part of the sentence, the manner in which closet is mentioned in the end of it, produces to the mind of the reader much of the effect of an anti-climax. How should his closet punish him, by any thing separate from the punishment of his own reflec tions? D & LETTER LETTER XIX. ADDRESSED TO THE PRINTER OF THE PUBLIC JUNIUS had alledged, in the Letter immediately preceding, that Sir William Blackstone's Commentaries, in order to represent faithfully the state of the law of England at the time when they were written, ought to have expressed all the causes of disqualification from serving in Parliament, which were then known to that law. He even bestowed the praise of affirming, that all the legal and known causes of such disqualification were faithfully exhibited in that excellent compendium of English jurisprudence. But he hence took occasion to reproach Blackstone so much the more severely, as an apostate from principles which he had solemnly recorded as his, and had recommended by his authority to the whole nation. Even since the publication of the Letter in which these facts were the most distinctly explained, Blackstone had found an Advocate; who, in a Letter to the Publisher of the St. James's Evening Post, imputed to JUNIUS, the absurdity of complaining, that the Commentaries of the Laws of England did not foretel events, as well as explain principles and institutions, did not anticipate the facts of the crimes, the expulsion, and the incapacitation of John Wilkes. It did not escape the sagacity of JUNIUS, that this imputation, however egregiously false, might have its weight with those careless readers to whom a joke, or a malicious insinuation, is at any time better than a grave and candid argument, and who are apt to hasten away, with half apprehended misrepresentations upon their minds, as being too light and indifferent about truth, to use any pains of enquiry to discover it, unless it be urged unavoidably upon their notice. He therefore hastened, in the person of PHILO-JUNIUS, to correct that writer's unjust charge. This was the object of the following short Letter. In the first paragraph of this Letter, its author relates and refutes the misrepresentation of his new opponent. In the second paragraph, he endeavours to confirm his own original statement, by a reference to to the incidents of the debate in the House of Commons, in which Blackstone's Commentaries were successfully quoted against himself. SIR, 14. August, 1769. A CORRESPONDENT of the St. James's Evening Post first wilfully misunderstands JUNIUS, then censures him for a bad reasoner. JUNIUS does not say that it was incumbent upon Doctor Blackstone to foresee and state the crimes for which Mr. Wilkes was expelled. If, by a spirit of prophecy, he had even done so, it would have been nothing to the purpose. The question is, not for what particular offences a person may be expelled; but generally, whether by the law of parliament expulsion alone creates a disqualification. If the affirmative be the law of parliament, Doctor Blackstone might and should have told us so. The question is not confined to this or that particular person, but forms one great general branch of disqualification, too important in itself, and too extensive in its consequences, to be omitted in an accurate work expressly treating of the law of parliament. THE truth of the matter is evidently this. Doctor Blackstone, while he was speaking in the House of Commons, never once thought of his Commentaries, until the contradiction was unexpectedly urged, and stared him in the face. Instead of defending himself upon the spot, he sunk under the Sunk under the charge, &c.] The labours of Lowth and of John |