It was to no purpose that Burke argued with more than legal closeness that incapacitation could not be a power according to law, inasmuch as it had neither of the two properties of law: it was not _known_, "you yourselves not knowing upon what grounds you will vote the incapacity of any man;" and it was not _fixed_, because it was varied according to the occasion, exercised according to discretion, and no man could call for it as a right.

A strain of unanswerable reasoning of this kind counted for nothing, in spite of its being unanswerable.

Despotic or oligarchic pretensions are proof against the most formidable battery that reason and experience can construct against them.

And Wilkes's exclusion endured until this Parliament--the Unreported Parliament, as it was called, and in many respects the very worst that ever assembled at Westminster--was dissolved, and a new one elected (1774), when he was once again returned for Middlesex, and took his seat.
The London multitude had grown zealous for Wilkes, and the town had been harassed by disorder.

Of the fierce brutality of the crowd of that age, we may form a vivid idea from the unflinching pencil of Hogarth.