Two Parliaments Escape Reform 241
constitution were again set up to public wonder. To the Dissenters’ argument that
the two acts were only pieces of legislation, obsolete measures which, at most,
might have been justified a century and more ago, it was replied that the acts were
of the very fabric of “our excellent constitution.” When the Dissenters pointed to
religious freedom in America, Pitt answered, “The American constitution resem-
bles ours neither in church nor state.”^39 When the Dissenters appealed to natural
rights, Burke found their position too abstract, and offered a preview in the House
of Commons of his forthcoming Reflections on the Revolution in France. Most of
all, the defenders of the existing arrangements used the arguments of Warburton,
of which a survey was given earlier in this book: it was not an affair of religious
belief; anyone remained free to believe as he wished and would be willingly toler-
ated; it was only a matter of “civil convenience,” for in England an establishment of
religion was found to be socially useful, and it was only reasonable for persons not
well affected toward such an establishment to be kept from the public power by
which it might be injured. Warburton’s argument of prescription was also brought
forward; the acts were over a century old, they had grown into the body of English
public life. They represented the wisdom of ancestors. And likewise employed was
his view of the terms of political office. “It was in the power of every government,”
said Lord North in the debate of May 1789, “to prescribe the persons to fill the
offices of power.”^40 No one could complain if Parliament, the sovereign body, made
communion in the national church, or any other qualification, a prerequisite to of-
ficial position.
The agitation raised by the Dissenters’ petition, as by the movement for parlia-
mentary reform, and by the American Revolution, had forced men to commit
themselves to conflicting theories of public authority and of individual rights. The
British Isles were to exhibit little solidarity toward the issues of the French Revo-
lution, or in the war that followed.
39 Parliamentary History, X XVIII, 413.
40 Ibid., X XVIII, 18.