Page:Thomas Hare - The Election of Representatives, parliamentary and municipal.djvu/168

 admitted as sufficient. The House has [ample power to compel the attendance of its members for the performance of their parliamentary duties; and if that attendance shotdd interfere with their official labours, it will be for those who superintend the latter duties to complain. The public would approve and applaud the act of any minister, who for such just cause, and fearless of any slander of his motives, should dismiss a public officer, notwithstanding his position in the House. Considerations of this nature are too minute to be made the basis of general legislation. They must, like the current of events, be left to the solution of time and circumstance. Parliamentary annals furnish an example of a Cornet of the Guards, who, deprived of his commission for his opposition to the minister, became, therefore, not less useful to the people, and found no scanty indemnity both in honour and in fame.

Another excluded class are persons in holy orders. The circumstances under which the statute establishing this restriction was, little more than fifty years ago, carried through Parliament by a minister whom history has not placed in any very elevated position amongst statesmen, are well known. The most attentive perusal of the debates will fail to discover the shadow of a reason for the exclusion. The bishop of Rochester adverted to what he thought the only objection; the unbecoming nature of our electioneering system, which, as has been stated, would form more or less a difficulty to all scrupulous men, "the means by which candidates were obliged to seek admittance into the lower House, such as opening houses of entertainment, and truckling to