ordships, is too evident to be doubted.

How often this privilege has been exerted by this house, and how often
it has rescued our country from oppression, insolence, and rapine; how
often our constitution has been reanimated, and impending ruin been
averted by it, a superficial acquaintance with history may inform us.
And we are now called upon by the universal cry of the nation, and urged
by the perplexed and uncertain state of our foreign affairs, and
declension of our wealth, and attacks upon our liberties at home, to
recollect these precedents of magnanimity and justice, and to make
another effort for the relief of our country.

This house, my lords, has proceeded against ministers, whose conduct
they disapproved, by methods of greater or less severity, according to
the necessity of affairs, or the supposed malignity of the crimes
alleged against them; and, therefore, have sometimes thought it
necessary to deter posterity from imitating them by rigorous censures,
and exemplary punishments, and sometimes have thought it sufficient to
set the nation free from its distresses, without inflicting any
penalties on those by whose misconduct they imagined them produced.

What were the more violent and vindictive methods of proceeding, it is
not necessary, with regard to this motion, to examine; since I shall
only propose, that we should, in imitation of our predecessors, in cases
of this nature, humbly address his majesty to remove the minister from
his presence and councils.

Nothing, my lords, can be more moderate or tender than such an address,
by which no punishment is inflicted, nor any forfeiture exacted. The
minister, if he be innocent, if his misconduct be only the consequence
of his ignorance or incapacity, may lay down in peace an office for
which nature has not designed him, enjoy the vast profits of long
employment in tranquillity, and escape the resentment of an unhappy
people; who, when irritated to the highest degree, by a continuation of
the same miscarriages, may, perhaps, in the heat of a more malevolent
prosecution, not sufficiently distinguish between inability and guilt.

Those, therefore, among your lordships, that think him honest but
mistaken, must willingly agree to a motion like this, as the best
expedient to appease the people without the ruin of the minister. For
surely no man who has read the history, or is acquainted with the temper
of this nation, can expect that the people will always be