isdom, or of virtue; their enemies must
either be awed by their honesty, or terrified by their cunning. Mere
artless bribery will never gain a sufficient majority to set them
entirely free from apprehensions of censure. To different tempers
different motives must be applied: some, who place their felicity in
being accounted wise, are in very little care to preserve the character
of honesty; others may be persuaded to join in measures which they
easily discover to be weak and ill-concerted, because they are convinced
that the authors of them are not corrupt but mistaken, and are unwilling
that any man should be punished for natural defects or casual ignorance.

I cannot say, sir, which of these motives influences the advocates for
the bill before us; a bill in which such cruelties are proposed as are
yet unknown among the most savage nations, such as slavery has not yet
borne, or tyranny invented, such as cannot be heard without resentment,
nor thought of without horrour.

It is, sir, perhaps, not unfortunate, that one more expedient has been
added, rather ridiculous than shocking, and that these tyrants of the
administration, who amuse themselves with oppressing their
fellow-subjects, who add without reluctance one hardship to another,
invade the liberty of those whom they have already overborne with taxes,
first plunder and then imprison, who take all opportunities of
heightening the publick distresses, and make the miseries of war the
instruments of new oppressions, are too ignorant to be formidable, and
owe their power not to their abilities, but to casual prosperity, or to
the influence of money.

The other clauses of this bill, complicated at once with cruelty and
folly, have been treated with becoming indignation; but this may be
considered with less ardour of resentment, and fewer emotions of zeal,
because, though, perhaps, equally iniquitous, it will do no harm; for a
law that can never be executed can never be felt.

That it will consume the manufacture of paper, and swell the books of
statutes, is all the good or hurt that can be hoped or feared from a law
like this; a law which fixes what is in its own nature mutable, which
prescribes rules to the seasons and limits to the wind. I am too well
acquainted, sir, with the disposition of its two chief supporters, to
mention the contempt with which this law will be treated by posterity,
for they have already shown abundantly their disregard of succeeding
genera