he was left by his successors, after the loud threats which had been heard of parliamentary inquiries and impeachment, was considered by many as a complete triumph over his enemies, and an unanswerable proof of his innocence; though certainly there are other more plausible ways of accounting for ministers avoiding to bring into precedent the instituting of rigorous inquiries into the conduct of their predecessors.

April 11.-You see, my dear Roget, that till this moment I have not been able to find an opportunity to finish my letter. Since my being interrupted in it, the new administration has been appointed; it is exactly the same as that which I have already mentioned had been proposed by the Duke of Portland, with the addition of the following appointments: - Burke is Paymaster of the Forces; the other Lords of the Treasury are Sir Grey Cooper of the North party, Mr. Montagu and Lord Surrey of the Whig party. Colonel North is to be the secretary to his father, and Lord North is to be created a Peer. The Lord Chancellor has resigned, and the Great Seal is to be put in commission; the Lords Commissioners to be Lord Loughborough, formerly Wedderburn (the man whom Fox has repeatedly charged with being the immediate author of the American war), and two other judges. Last Monday, Fox was re-elected for Westminster, because no person opposed him. The populace received him with hisses, hooting, and every other mark of displeasure; he attempted to speak to them several times, but to no purpose; they were resolved not

to hear him. Byng and Lord Surrey, Fox's great friends, and men who were once very popular, endeavoured to harangue the people, but all in vain; the people would listen to none of them. At last, Fox was proposed, and of mere necessity elected; afterwards he with difficulty obtained an audience from the people, and the very short speech he made was frequently interrupted by the hisses of his hearers.

Pray, when you write to Dumont, make my excuses for not answering the letter which M. Mercier brought me. I had intended to have written by Lecointe, but he went sooner than I expected.

S. R.

LETTER XXX.

My dear Roget,

London, May 9. 1783.

I was in hopes I should have been able to give you a good account of a debate which took place the day before yesterday in the House of Commons, upon a motion of Mr. Pitt, for a more equal representation in Parliament; but, though I was at the House by twelve o'clock, I could not gain admittance, the gallery having been quite full at a little after eleven, and three times as many as it would hold obliged to come away. One might imagine, from this crowding, that a great many persons took concern in the fate of their country; but the truth is, that it was the eloquence of Mr. Pitt, and not the subject on which it was to be employed, that excited people's curiosity and, no

doubt, the reflection which his speech produced in the minds of many of his hearers, was not unlike that which the usurer makes upon the preacher in the Diable Boiteux, "Il a bien fait son métier; allons faire le nôtre."

We have lately had a very convincing proof that laws, which contradict and (if I may so express myself) do violence to the general sentiments of a nation, never can be executed. Two officers quarrelled about a gaming debt; they did not fight till six months afterwards, when a duel ensued. One of the officers was shot through the lungs, and, though he could with difficulty stand, he insisted upon firing; he did so, and killed his adversary. The law is express, that to kill a man in a duel is murder. The coroner's inquest, however, which sat upon the body of the person killed, refused to bring in a verdict of murder; and the body was buried in Westminster Abbey, attended by the choir, and with a kind of military pomp. A few days afterwards the other officer died.

I have just got the newspaper with the account of the debate upon Mr. Pitt's motion. The motion was, that the House should come to the three following resolutions:- 1. That it was the opinion of the House that measures were highly necessary to be taken to prevent bribery and corruption at future elections for Parliament. 2. That, in future, when the majority of voters for any borough should be convicted of gross and notorious corruption before a committee of that House, such borough should be disfranchised, and the minority of voters not so convicted should be entitled to vote for the

county in which such borough should be situated. 3. That an addition of knights of the shire and of representatives of the metropolis should be made to the representative body. In his speech, he said that the addition he would propose should be of about 100 members. He spoke He spoke of a perfectly equal representation as a wild Utopian scheme which never could be realized, and gave as a reason for not proposing to strike off the corrupt boroughs and those which are the patrimony of particular families, that it would be an unjust and an unwarrantable invasion of private property. This is a kind of argument which, I confess, has no. great weight with me; for I think the laws are not bound to protect men in the possession of such pecuniary advantages as they ought never to have obtained. If a man's having a pecuniary interest in a thing, no matter how acquired, is sufficient to make his property in it sacred, then may the laws become a shield to every species of fraud, iniquity, and immorality. The motion was lost (as you will, no doubt, have expected) by a majority of 293 against 149. Fox strenuously defended the motion; Lord North as warmly op posed it. Burke rose to speak; but it was late, and a great many members, dreading the length of his oration, quitted the House at the very same moment, which so much offended him that he sat down without speaking: this has happened to him more than once.

I am much obliged to you for giving me your sentiments on the question, whether any crime ought to be punished with death. The objection

you make to the punishment of death, founded on the errors of human tribunals and the impossibility of having absolute demonstration of the guilt of a criminal, strikes me more forcibly than any argument I have ever before heard on the same side of the question. I confess, however, that to myself it seems absolutely impossible, even if it were to be wished (of which I am not quite sure), to omit death in the catalogue of human punishments; for, if the criminal will not submit to the punishment inflicted on him, if he escapes from his prison, refuses to perform the labour prescribed to him, or commits new crimes, he must, at last, be punished with death. So it is, at least, in the Utopia of Sir Thomas More; and it is a very melancholy reflection, that some of the miserable victims of that excellent philosopher's compassion might, if his visions had ever been realized, have suffered years of miserable servitude in addition to the punishment of death, which would at last be inflicted on them as the consequence of crimes which they had been provoked to commit. One reason why I cannot think that death ought so earefully to be avoided among human punishments is, that I do not think death the greatest of evils. Beccaria and his disciples confess that it is not, and recommend other punishments as being more severe and effectual, forgetting, undoubtedly, that if human tribunals have a right to inflict a severer punishment than death, they must have a right to inflict death itself.

You will not, I hope, conclude from all this that I am perfectly satisfied with the penal codes that