which are at once so natural and so very much tempered and subdued,
should have no weight with an House of Commons which has its eye
elsewhere, I would turn my eyes to the very quarter to which theirs are
directed. I would reason this matter with the House on the mere policy
of the question; and I would undertake to prove that an early
dereliction of abuse is the direct interest of government,--of
government taken abstractedly from its duties, and considered merely as
a system intending its own conservation.

If there is any one eminent criterion which above all the rest
distinguishes a wise government from an administration weak and
improvident, it is this: "well to know the best time and manner of
yielding what it is impossible to keep." There have been, Sir, and
there are, many who choose to chicane with their situation rather than
be instructed by it. Those gentlemen argue against every desire of
reformation upon the principles of a criminal prosecution. It is enough
for them to justify their adherence to a pernicious system, that it is
not of their contrivance,--that it is an inheritance of absurdity,
derived to them from their ancestors,--that they can make out a long and
unbroken pedigree of mismanagers that have gone before them. They are
proud of the antiquity of their house; and they defend their errors as
if they were defending their inheritance, afraid of derogating from
their nobility, and carefully avoiding a sort of blot in their
scutcheon, which they think would degrade them forever.

It was thus that the unfortunate Charles the First defended himself on
the practice of the Stuart who went before him, and of all the Tudors.
His partisans might have gone to the Plantagenets. They might have found
bad examples enough, both abroad and at home, that could have shown an
ancient and illustrious descent. But there is a time when men will not
suffer bad things because their ancestors have suffered worse. There is
a time when the hoary head of inveterate abuse will neither draw
reverence nor obtain protection. If the noble lord in the blue ribbon
pleads, "_Not guilty_," to the charges brought against the present
system of public economy, it is not possible to give a fair verdict by
which he will not stand acquitted. But pleading is not our present
business. His plea or his traverse may be allowed as an answer to a
charge, when a charge is made. But if he puts himself in the way to
obstruct reformation, then the