such assemblies are permitted to have a longer duration, there grows up a commerce of corruption between the ministry and the deputies, wherein they both find their accounts, to the manifest danger of liberty; which traffick would neither answer the design nor expense, if parliaments met once a year.
I ever abominated that scheme of politicks, (now about thirty years old) of setting up a monied interest in opposition to the landed. For I conceived, there could not be a truer maxim in our government than this, that the possessors of the soil are the best judges of what is for the advantage of the kingdom. If others had thought the same way, funds of credit and South sea projects would neither have been felt nor heard of.
I could never discover the necessity of suspending any law upon which the liberty of the most innocent persons depended: neither do I think this practice has made the taste of arbitrary power so agreeable, as that we should desire to see it repeated. Every rebellion subdued, and plot discovered, contribute to the firmer establishment of the prince: In the latter case, the knot of conspirators is entirely broken, and they are to begin their work anew under a thousand disadvantages; so that those diligent inquiries into remote and problematical guilt, with a new power of enforcing them by chains and dungeons to every person whose face a minister things fit to dislike, are not only opposite to that maxim, which declares it better that ten guilty men should escape, than one innocent suffer; but likewise leave a gate wide open to the whole tribe of informers, the most accursed, and prostitute, and abandoned race, that God ever permitted to plague mankind.
It
