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Now that civilisation is our civilisation, and we never had any other. We have not inherited a Teutonic culture any more than a Druid culture; not half so much. The people who say that parliaments or pictures or gardens or roads or universities were made by the Teutonic race from the north can be disposed of by the simple question: why did not the Teutonic race make them in the north?
Grenville proved that this had not been the opinion of former Parliaments; and he contended, with unanswerable logic, that it would be very mischievous to the nation if such a principle should be now acted on, and such a precedent established, since, though employed in the first instance against the odious and the guilty, it might, when once established, be easily applied to, and made use of against, the meritorious and the innocent; and so the most eminent and deserving members of the state, under the color of such an example, by one arbitrary and discretionary vote of one House of Parliament, the worst species of ostracism, might be excluded from the public councils, cut off and proscribed from the rights of every subject of the realm, not for a term of years alone, but forever.
The things said most confidently by advanced persons to crowded audiences are generally those quite opposite to the fact; it is actually our truisms that are untrue. Here is a case. There is a phrase of facile liberality uttered again and again at ethical societies and parliaments of religion: "the religions of the earth differ in rites and forms, but they are the same in what they teach."
Even when the Union was agreed to by the Parliaments of both kingdoms, and took effect formally in May, 1707, difficulties arose in putting the details in operation, and Defoe prolonged his stay in Scotland through the whole of that year. In this visit to Scotland Defoe protested to the world at the time that he had gone as a diplomatist on his own account, purely in the interests of peace.
Parliament granted no money; and Edward only met his daily expenses by loans, contracted from every quarter, and by keeping tight hands on the confiscated estates of the Templars. Both the king and the leading earls made every excuse to escape attending the ineffective parliaments of that miserable time. There were some hasty musterings of armed men on pretence of tournaments.
In 1640 he was chosen a Member of the House of Commons, for Newport in the Isle of Wight, in the Parliament which began at Westminster the 13th of April in the same year, and from the debates, says Clarendon, which were managed with all imaginable gravity and sobriety, 'he contracted such a reverence for Parliaments, that he thought it absolutely impossible they ever could produce mischief or inconvenience to the nation, or that the kingdom could be tolerably happy in the intermission of them, and from the unhappy, and unseasonable dissolution of the Parliament he harboured some prejudice to the court.
I found that it melted between my hands, and with it disappeared that other fact, so difficult to credit, yet as it had appeared so impossible to deny, that English Parliaments, English judges, English clergy, statesmen whose beneficent legislation survives among the most valued of our institutions, prelates who were the founders and martyrs of the English Church, were the cowardly accomplices of abominable atrocities, and had disgraced themselves with a sycophancy which the Roman senate imperfectly approached when it fawned on Nero.
They called for a vigorous policy of colonization and of instruction and experiment in agriculture; for simplification of judicial procedure and the forms of government; for the election, on the American plan, of administrative as well as legislative authorities; for annual parliaments; for increased powers of local government; for universal suffrage; for the abolition of clergy reserves, seigneurial tenure, and church tithes; and for the repeal of the Union.
In the old times before the Revolution, a Parliament might sit during the life of the monarch. Parliaments were then sometimes of eighteen or twenty years' duration.
The Irish people had again and again begged that they should be permitted to establish a mint in which coins could be issued of the same standard and intrinsic value as those used in England. English parliaments, however, invariably disregarded these petitions.
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