Page:The World's Famous Orations Volume 6.djvu/179

LORD PLUNKET sense of it, as a right supposed to be derived by prescription or grant from the Crown, but in the sense of Mr. Burke, when he applied it to the right of voting for members to sit, and to the right of sitting in Parliament. Sir, these are privileges not derived from the grace of the Crown or the permission of the Legislature, or from the positive declaration of any written law, but drawn from the great original sources from which crown and law and legislature have been derived; from the sacred fountains of British Constitution and freedom; the denial of which, as justified by any supposed principles of our Constitution, I take on me to denounce as founded on a radical ignorance of the essence and stamina of our civil polity.

This principle of exclusion is equally at war with the prerogative of the Crown and the title of the subject. It wrests the scepter from the king that it may strike at the liberties of the people, and obtrudes an unconstitutional monopoly on the just rights of both. It is an insolent republican principle, which has more than once been publicly and universally reprobated in this House; the principle of lawless association, for the purpose of lawless exclusion, and which promises a conditional allegiance to the monarch, so long only as he shall uphold the arrogant and exclusive claims of one class of his subjects against the inherent rights and privileges of the other.

In all continued struggles between a lawful 169