Page:The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 19.djvu/100

90 or morals of the people, — such as profanity, drunkenness, challenging to fight, soliciting to the commission of crime, carrying infection through the streets, — an endless variety of offences.

These terms, when used to describe political offences, have a signification coextensive with, or rather analogous to, but yet more extensive than their legal acceptation; for, as John Quincy Adams said, “the Legislature was vested with power of impeaching and removing for trivial transgressions beneath the cognizance of the law.” The sense in which they are used in the Constitution is rendered clearer and more precise by the long line of precedents of decided cases to be found in the State Trials and historical collections. Selden, in his “Judicature of Parliament,” and Coke, in his “Institutes,” refer to many of these, and Comyns names more than fifty impeachable offences. Amongst these are, subverting the fundamental laws and introducing arbitrary power; for an ambassador to give false information to the king; to make a treaty between two foreign powers without the knowledge of the king; to deliver up towns without consent of his colleagues; to incite the king to act against the advice of Parliament; to give the king evil counsel; for the Speaker of the House of Commons to refuse to proceed; for the Lord Chancellor to threaten the other judges to make them subscribe to his opinions.

Wooddeson, who began to lecture in 1777, and whose works express the sense in which the terms were understood by the contemporaries of the founders of the Constitution, says that “such kinds of misdeeds as peculiarly injure the commonwealth by the abuses of high offices of trust are the most proper, and have been the most usual grounds for this kind of prosecution”; — “as, for example, for the Lord Chancellor to act grossly contrary to the duty of his office; for the judges to mislead the sovereign by unconstitutional opinions; for any other magistrates to attempt to subvert the fundamental laws, or introduce arbitrary power, as for a Privy-Councillor to propose or support pernicious or dishonorable practices.”

These text-writers seem to have been referred to and followed by our later ones. But to the offences enumerated by these authorities we must add others taken from cases in the State Trials. The High Court of Impeachment had included amongst political high crimes and misdemeanors the following, viz.: for a Secretary of State to abuse the pardoning power; for the Lord Chancellor and Chief Justice of Ireland to attempt to subvert the laws and government and the rights of Parliament; for the Attorney-General to prefer charges of treason falsely; for a Privy-Councillor to try to alienate the affections of the people; for the Lord Chancellor to assume to dispense with the statutes, and to control them. It had been held to be a misdemeanor to incite the king to ill-manners; to put away from the king good officers, and put about him wicked ones of their own party; to maintain robbers and murderers, causing the king to pardon them; to get ascendency over the king, and turn his heart from the peers of the realm; to prevent the great men of the realm from advising with the king, save in presence of the accused; and to cause the king to appoint sheriffs named by them, so as to get such men returned to Parliament as they desired, to the undoing of the loyal lords and the good laws and customs; to taunt the king’s councilors, and call them unworthy to sit in council when they advised the king to reform the government; or to write letters declaring them traitors.

The nature of the charges may be illustrated by one of the allegations against an evil judge. We give Article VIII.: “The said William Scroggs, being advanced to be Lord Chief Justice of the Court of King’s Bench, ought, by a sober, grave, and virtuous conversation, to have given a good example to