departure from the principles of it. It is a copy in miniature of the government of England, established at the conquest of that country by William of Normandy. I have shewn this in part in the case of the king's negative, and I shall shew it more fully as I go on. This brings me to speak of

the Senate.

The complaint respecting the Senate is the length of its duration, being four years. The sage Franklin has said, "Where annual election ends, tyranny begins;" and no man was a better judge of human nature than Franklin, nor has any man in our time exceeded him in the principles of honour and honesty.

When a man ceases to be accountable to those who elected him, and with whose public affairs he is entrusted, he ceases to be their representative, and is put in a condition of being their despot. He becomes the representative of nobody but himself. I am elected, says he, for four years; you cannot turn me out, neither am I responsible to you in the meantime, All that you have to do with me is to pay me.

The conduct of the Pennsylvania Senate, in 1800, respecting the choice of electors for the Presidency of the United States, shews the impropriety and danger of such an establishment. The manner of choosing electors ought to be fixed in the Constitution, and not be left to the caprice of contention. It is a matter equally as important, and concerns the rights and interests of the people as much as the election of members for the State Legislature, and in some instances much more. By the conduct of the Senate at that time the people were deprived of their right of suffrage, and the State lost its consequence in the Union. It had but one vote. The other fourteen were paired off by compromise. Seven and seven. If the people had chosen the electors, which they had a right to do, for the electors were to represent them and not to represent the Senate; the State would have had fifteen votes which would have counted.

The Senate is an imitation of what is called the House of Lords in England, and which Chesterfield, who was a member of it, and therefore knew it, calls "the hospital of incurables." The Senate in Pennsylvania is not quite an hospital of incurables, but it took almost four years to bring it to a state of convalescence.

Before we imitate any thing, we ought to examine whether it be worth imitating, and had this been done by the Convention at that time, they would have seen that the model from which their mimic imitation was made, was no better than unprofitable and disgraceful lumber.

There was no such thing in England as what is called the House of Lords, until the conquest of that country by the Normans, under William the Conqueror, and like the King's negative over the laws, it is a badge of disgrace upon the country; for it is the effect and evidence of its having been reduced to unconditional submission.

William having made the conquest dispossessed the owners of their lands, and divided those lands among the chiefs of the plundering army he brought with him, and from hence arose what is called the House of LORDS. Daniel de Foe, in his historical satire, intitled, "The True-born Englishman," has very concisely given the origin and character of this house as follows:

The great invading Norman let them know
What conquerors, in after times, might do ;
To every musqueteer he brought to town,
He gave
the lands that never were his own-
He cantoned out the country to his men,
And every soldier was a denizen;

No Parliament his army could disband,

He raised no money, for he paid in land,

The rascals, thus enriched, he called them Lords,
To please their upstart pride with new made words,
And Domesday Book his tyranny records;

Some show the sword, the bow, and some the spear,
Which their great ancestor, forsooth, did wear;
But who the hero was, no man can tell,

Whether a colonel or a corporal;

The silent record blushes to reveal

Their undescended dark original;

Great ancestors of yesterday, they shew,

And Lords, whose fathers were-the Lord knows who!

This is the disgraceful origin of what is called the House of Lords in England, and it still retains some tokens of the plundering baseness of its origin. The swindler Dundas was lately made a lord, and is now called noble lord! Why do they not give him his proper title and call him noble swindler! for he swindled by wholesale. But it is probable he will escape punishment; for Blackstone, in his commentary on the laws, recites an act of parliament passed in 1550, and not since repealed, that extends what is called the benefit of clergy, that is exemption from punishment for all clerical offences to all lords and peers of the realm who could not read, as well as those who could, and also for "the crimes of house-breaking, highway-robbing, horse-stealing, and robbing of churches." This is consistent with the original

establishment of the House of Lords, for it was originally composed of robbers. This is aristocracy. This is one of the pillars of John Adams's "stupenduous fabric of human invention." A privilege for house-breaking, highway-robbing, horse-stealing, and robbing of churches! John Adams knew but little of the origin and practice of the government of England. As to Constitution it has none.

The Pennsylvania Convention of 1776, copied nothing from the English Government. It formed a Constitution on the basis of honesty. The defect, as I have already said of that Constitution was the precipitancy to which the legislatures might be subject in enacting laws. All the members of that Legislature established by that Constitution, sat in one chamber and debated in one body, and thus subjected them to precipitancy. But this precipitancy was provided against, but not effectually. The Constitution ordered that the laws, before being finally enacted, should be published for public consideration. But as no given time was fixed for that consideration, nor any means for collecting its effects, nor were there then any public newspapers in the State but what were printed in Philadelphia, the provision did not reach the intention of it, and thus a good and wise intention sunk into mere form, which is generally the case when the means are not adequate to the end.

The ground work, however, of that Constitution was good and deserves to be resorted to. Every thing that Franklin was concerned in producing, merits attention. He was the wise and benevolent friend of man. Riches and honours made no alteration in his principles or his manners.

The Constitution of 1776 was conformable to the Declaration of Independence and the Declaration of Rights, which the present Constitution is not; for it makes artificial distinctions among men in the right of suffrage, which the principles of equity know nothing of; neither is it consistent with sound policy. We every day see the rich becoming poor, and those who were poor before becoming rich. Riches, therefore, having no stability, cannot and ought not to be made a criterion of rights. Man is man in every condition of life, and the varieties of fortune and misfortune are open to all.

Had the number of representatives in the legislature, established by that Constitution, been increased, and instead of their sitting together in one chamber, and debating and voting all at one time, to have divided them by lot into two equal parts and to have sat in separate chambers, the advantage would have been, that one half by not being entangled

in the first debate, nor having committed itself by voting, would be silently possessed of the arguments, for and against, of the former part, and be in a calm condition to review the whole. And instead of one chamber, or one house, or by whatever name they may be called, negativing the vote of the other, which is now the case, and which admits of inconsistencies even to absurdities, to have added the votes of both chambers together and the majority of the whole to be the final decision. There would be reason in this but there is none in the present mode. The instance that occurred in the Pennsylvania Senate, in the year 1800, on the bill for choosing electors, where a small majority in that house. controuled and negatived a large majority in the other house, shews the absurdity of such a division of legislative power.

To know if any theory or position be true or rational, in practice, the method is, to carry it to its greatest extent; if it be not true upon the whole, or be absurd, it is so in all its parts however small. For instance,

If one house consists of two hundred members and the other fifty, which is about the proportion they are in some of the States, and if a proposed law be carried on the affirmative in the larger house with only one dissenting voice, and be negatived in the smaller house by a majority of one, the event will be, that twenty-seven controul, and govern two hundred and twenty-three, which is too absurd even for argument, and totally inconsistent with the principles of representative government, which know no difference in the value and importance of its members but what arises from their virtues and talents, and not at all from the name of the house, or chamber where they sit in.

As the practice of a smaller number negativing a greater is not founded in reason we must look for its origin in some other cause.

The Americans have copied it from England, and it was brought into England by the Norman Conqueror, and is derived from the ancient French practice of voting by ORDERS, of which they counted three; the clergy (that is, Roman Catholic clergy) the noblesse, (those who had titles) and the tiers etat, or third estate, which included all who

* The practice of voting by orders in France whenever the States-General met, continued until the late Revolution. It was the present Abbe Syeyes who made the motion, in what was afterwards called the National Assembly, for abolishing the vote by orders, and established the rational practice of deciding by a majority of numbers.

were not of the two former orders, and which in England are called the commons, or common people, and the house in which they are represented is from thence called the House of Commons.

The case with the Conqueror was, that in order to complete and secure the conquest he had made, and hold the country in subjection, he cantoned it out among the chiefs of his army, to whom he gave castles, and whom he dubbed with the title of lords, as is before shewn. These being dependent on the Conqueror, and having a united interest with him, became the defenders of his measures, and the guardians of his assumed prerogative against the people; and when the House called the Commons House of Parliament began by grants and charters from the Conqueror and his successors, these lords claiming to be a distinct ORDER from the Commons, though smaller in number, held a controuling, or negativing vote over them, and from hence arose the irrational practice of a smaller number negativing a greater. But what are these things to us, or why should we imitate them? We have but one ORDER in America, and that of the highest degree, the ORDER of SOVEREIGNTY, and of this ORDER every citizen is a member in his own personal right. Why then have we descended to the base imitation of inferior things? By the event of the Revolution we were put in a condition of thinking originally. The history of past ages show scarcely any thing to us but instances of tyranny and antiquated absurdities. We have copied some of them and experienced the folly of them.

Another subject of complaint in Pennsylvania is the judiciary, and this appears to require a thorough reform. Arbitration will of itself reform a great part, but much will remain to require amendment.

The courts of law still continue to go on, as to practice, in the same manner as when the State was a British colony. They have not yet arrived at the dignity of independence. They hobble along by the stilts and crutches of English and antiquated precedents. Their pleadings are made up of cases and reports from English law books; many of which are tyrannical, and all of them are now foreign to us. Our courts require to be domesticated, for as they are at present

*The above address being published in the American journals of the day, this break is occasioned by the Editor, not being able to obtain but three parts of four or five,