BURKE
lordships have not; nor the Commons; nor the whole Legislature.
We have no arbitrary power to give, because arbitrary power is a thing which neither any man can hold nor any man can give. No man can lawfully govern himself according to his own will—much less can one person be governed by the will of another. We are all born in subjection—all born equally, high and low, governors and governed, in subjection to one great, immutable, preexistent law, prior to all our devices, and prior to all our contrivances, paramount to all our ideas and to all our sensations, antecedent to our very existence, by which we are knit and connected in the eternal frame of the universe, out of which we can not stir.
This great law does not arise from our conventions or compacts; on the contrary, it gives to our conventions and compacts all the force and
which are developed by liberty and civilization were now displayed; with every advantage that could be derived both from cooperation and from contrast. "Every step in the proceedings carried the mind either backward, through many troubled centuries, to the days when the foundations of our Constitution were laid; or far away, over boundless seas and deserts, to dusky nations living under strange stars, worshiping strange gods, and writing strange characters from right to left. The High Court of Parliament was to sit, according to forms handed down from the days of the Plantagenets, on an Englishman accused of exercising tyranny over the lord of the holy city of Benares, and over the ladies of the princely house of Oude. "The place was worthy of such a trial. It was the great hall of
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