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This is plausible, but not cogent. It is a scheme of representation, which would make a specious appearance in a political romance, but cannot be brought into practice among us, who see every day the towering head of speculation bow down unwillingly to groveling experience.

Governments formed by chance, and gradually improved by such expedients, as the successive discovery of their defects happened to suggest, are never to be tried by a regular theory. They are fabricks of dissimilar materials, raised by different architects, upon different plans. We must be content with them, as they are; should we attempt to mend their disproportions, we might easily demolish, and difficultly rebuild them.

Laws are now made, and customs are established; these are our rules, and by them we must be guided.

It is uncontrovertibly certain, that the commons never intended to leave electors the liberty of returning them an expelled member; for they always require one to be chosen in the room of him that is expelled, and I see not with what propriety a man can be rechosen in his own room.

Expulsion, if this were its whole effect, might very often be desirable. Sedition, or obscenity, might be no greater crimes in the opinion of other electors, than in that of the freeholders of Middlesex; and many a wretch, whom his colleagues should expel, might come back persecuted into fame, and provoke, with harder front, a second expulsion.

Many of the representatives of the people can hardly be said to have been chosen at all. Some, by inheriting a borough, inherit a seat; and some sit by the favour of others, whom, perhaps, they may gratify by the act which provoked the expulsion. Some are safe by their popularity, and some by their alliances. None would dread expulsion, if this doctrine were received, but those who bought their elections, and who would be obliged to buy them again at a higher price.

But as uncertainties are to be determined by things certain, and customs to be explained, where it is possible, by written law, the patriots have triumphed with a quotation from an act of the fourth and fifth of Anne, which permits those to be rechosen, whose seats are vacated by the acceptance of a place of profit. This they wisely consider as an expulsion, and from the permission, in this case, of a reelection, infer, that every other expulsion leaves the delinquent entitled to the same indulgence. This is the paragraph:

“If any person, being chosen a member of the house of commons, shall accept of any office from the crown, during such time as he shall continue a member, his election shall be, and is hereby declared to be void; and a new writ shall issue for a new election, as if such person, so accepting, was naturally dead. Nevertheless such person shall be capable of being again elected, as if his place had not become void as aforesaid.”

How this favours the doctrine of readmission, by a second choice, I am not able to discover. The statute of the thirtieth of Charles the second had enacted, that “he who should sit in the house of commons, without taking the oaths, and subscribing the test, should be disabled to sit in the house during that parliament, and a writ should issue for the election of a new member, in place of the member so disabled, as if such member had naturally died.”

This last clause is, apparently, copied in the act of Anne, but with the common fate of imitators. In the act of Charles, the political death continued during the parliament; in that of Anne it was hardly worth the while to kill the man whom the next breath was to revive. It is, however, apparent, that in the opinion of the parliament, the dead-doing lines would have kept him motionless, if he had not been recovered by a kind exception. A seat vacated could not be regained, without express permission of the same statute.