thoroughly revised. It was their business to prepare all matters for discussion in Parliament, and it gradually became the general rule, with some few exceptions, that nothing was laid before Parliament without their previous recommendation. From the reign of James IV., the Lords of the Articles are regularly named in the records of every Parliament.

"It is said," remarks Mr. Hallam, "that a Scots Parliament about the middle of the fifteenth century consisted of nearly one hundred and ninety persons. We do not find, however, that more than half this number usually attended. A list of those present in 1472 gives but fourteen bishops and abbots, twenty-two earls and barons, thirty-four lairds or lesser tenants-in-capite, and eight deputies of boroughs. The royal boroughs entitled to be represented in Parliament were about thirty; but it was a common usage to choose the deputies of other towns as their proxies "to save expense, which appears to have always been the great object of the Scotch Parliament."

There are no chronicles of constitutional struggles in Parliament, no records of limitations imposed on the royal power, no traces of the purchase of privileges by payments in hard cash as in England. The whole tendency of the existence of Parliament appears to have been to augment the royal power. The king, moreover, possessed such large domains that he was practically independent of subsidies granted in Parliament. There was naturally, therefore, hardly any opposition to the measures proposed by the Lords of the Articles. Discontented barons stayed away from Parliament altogether, to avoid the chance of being arrested or assassinated; and the Constitution would have worked extremely smoothly but for the fact that what was lost in constitutional opposition was amply made up in armed rebellion, private war, and open defiance of the law.

Parliament having only the right of accepting or rejecting in its entirety any measure proposed by the Lords of the Articles, without the power of amendment, the latter were practically able to force any obnoxious proposal through Parliament by tacking" it on to some bill of vital importance. It was by the employment of dishonourable tactics such as these that Charles I. succeeded in procuring the acceptance of his new

Prayer-Book by the Scotch Parliament, in spite of their repugnance to the innovation. The Stuart kings, moreover, acquired such complete control over the election of the Lords of the Articles that they degenerated into mere instruments of misgovernment, The very name became hateful, and one of the first acts of the Convention Parliament, which met in 1689 to reconsider the Constitution, was to abolish them.

In the year 1702, by leave of the English and Scotch Parliaments, commissioners met to make arrangements for the union of both assemblies. Neither party, however, were very much in earnest, and they eventually separated-1703-without having effected any settlement. The Scotch Parliament in the same year passed a number of limitations on the authority of the Crown, and finally introduced a Bill of Security authorizing Parliament to name a successor from among the Protestant descendants in the royal line, but asserting that whoever that successor might be, he was not to be the same as the successor to the Crown of England, unless proper security was given for the freedom of religion and trade. The royal assent was refused to this bill, but the refusal excited so much discontent that the bill was allowed to become law in 1704. In 1705 the Duke of Argyle was appointed High Commissioner to carry out the Union, which was now regarded by all as necessary. There were three parties in Parliament-the Government, the Opposition, and the Squadrone Volante, who trimmed between the two first, endeavouring to hold the balance, though, as a rule, they inclined to the Government. After many long debates and mixed concessions and menaces on the part of the English Government, in April, 1706, the commissioners, thirty-one on each side, met to arrange the terms of the Union.

The debates and skirmishes between the two parties were long and tedious, but on the whole it was recognised that the Union was a necessity. So at last a number of terms were agreed on and embodied in a regular treaty :-perhaps the most important being the stipulation that the two Parliaments should be united under one head. The Scots were to have forty-five members in the House of Commons, amounting to about a twelfth of the whole number of members. The numerous peerage of Scotland

were to be represented in the House of Lords by sixteen of their number, who were to be elected at each General Election by the whole mass of the Scotch peers, and were to sit during the session of Parliament. It was further arranged that no new Scotch peerages were to be created in the future.

This treaty was strongly disliked by a large section of the Parliament, and a grand scheme of opposition was concocted, which, however, failed at the last, owing to the pusillanimity of the leader. The Act of Union was in consequence carried successfully through the Scotch Parliament January 16, 1706/7, and shortly afterwards received the ratification of the English Parliament (6 Anne c. 7). The first Parliament of the United Kingdom of England and Scotland met in October, 1707.

The result of the provision prohibiting the creation of any fresh Scotch peerages is that the old ones are gradually becoming extinct, or practically absorbed in the English peerage by grants of English patents. It may be as well to mention that in most cases a Scotch peer who has obtained an English patent prefers to retain his old style and title on account of its superior antiquity, and, in most cases, superior rank. There are, therefore, many Scotch peers sitting in the House of Lords who are only known by their Scotch titles, but who owe their seats to some utterly ignored and unknown title of an English peerage. Thus the Duke of Argyle sits and votes as Baron Sundridge, and the Duke of Buccleuch as Earl of Doncaster. Neither Scotch peers nor their eldest sons are allowed to sit in the House of Commons. A Scotch peer, therefore, who cannot gain the suffrages of his fellows, or the esteem of the English Prime Minister, is practically debarred entirely from political life.

D

CHAPTER XII.

PARLIAMENTARY EXCESSES.

URING the first half of the eighteenth century it almost seemed as though a tyranny of Parliament had succeeded the tyranny of the king. On various points this body showed itself as arbitrary and unreasonable as the most high-flying of the Stuarts. Party feeling ran so high that the majority would fain have crushed their opponents entirely without giving them any hearing at all. The privilege of freedom of speech was practically limited by the condition of saying nothing distasteful to the Court or Ministry.

The weapons by which the Commons attacked all obnoxious to their power were very diverse. Sometimes they were contented with the infliction of a reprimand, of greater or less severity, by the mouth of the Speaker. More frequently this was followed by fine and imprisonment. It was by no means rare for these penalties to be supplemented by the harsher measure of expulsion. There is little doubt, moreover, that in many cases a majority made an unfair use of their power to revenge themselves on a political enemy, or even to diminish the ranks of the minority. For greater delinquents or more important victims the ancient weapon of impeachment was revived, and with it political criminals were vigorously attacked, whether they were members of Parliament or not. The House, moreover, extended its sphere of action by constructive renderings of the term privilege, and dealt out severe punishment to all who incurred its wrath. Reprimands, fines and imprisonment, prosecutions by the AttorneyGeneral, were decreed at will against offenders whom it would have been wiser to leave to the ordinary process and penalties of the common law. Among other encroachments the two Houses assumed a complete censorship of the press, and the annals of Parliament teem with records of the summons of unfortunate authors and printers to the bar of either House for the crime of

issuing some obnoxious fly-sheet, there to be condemned to humbly acknowledge their error and sue for pardon on their knees, with the alternative in the event of disobedience of whatever penalty the clemency or fury of the House might mete out to them. The period between 1700 and 1715 is especially replete with numerous cases of singular violence on the part of the Commons, which gave rise to a suspicion that this outrageous licence was partly due to indignant irritability at their helplessness and incapacity to grasp the power which had really fallen to them, and to assume their true position as rulers of the kingdom; partly, no doubt, due as well to their feeling of irresponsibility, which rendered them at once extraordinarily captious and utterly reckless of consequences. The gradual development of the Cabinet system and its establishment on a firmer basis put an end to the old scenes of confusion and injustice which had disgraced the early part of the century, and they were gradually succeeded by the steady, respectable stagnation and utter absence of incident, almost of business as well, which reduces the parliamentary history of the later years of George II. to the dead level of the dullest of annals.

In May, 1702, a complaint was made to the Lords concerning a pamphlet, called the History of the Last Parliament, which stated that there had existed in the House of Commons "a numerous, corrupt and licentious party," which had treated the Princess Anne with "constant neglect, slight, and disrespect." The printers were ordered to attend Parliament; but one Dr. Drake, having meanwhile owned himself to be the author, he was called in and interrogated by the Lord Keeper. Failing to offer a satisfactory defence, he was ordered to withdraw. The House proceeded rather intemperately to a resolution that the pamphlet contained several expressions that were "groundless, false, and scandalous," and directed the Attorney-General to prosecute Dr. Drake for writing the offending paragraph.

Shortly afterwards the attention of the Lords was directed to another book, which was called Animadversions upon the two last 30th of January Sermons. Several paragraphs were read out, and excited their ire so much that they denounced the amphlet in question as "a malicious, villainous libel, containing