n we, in my opinion, without
manifest injustice, dissolve a contract founded upon equity, and
confirmed by law.

It is, sir, an undisputed principle of government, that no person should
be punished without a crime; but is it no punishment to deprive a man of
what is due to him by a legal stipulation, the condition of which is, on
his part, honestly fulfilled?

Nothing, sir, can be imagined more calamitous than the disappointment to
which this law subjects the unhappy men who are now promoting the
interest of their country in distant places, amidst dangers and
hardships, in unhealthy climates, and barbarous nations, where they
comfort themselves, under the fatigues of labour and the miseries of
sickness, with the prospect of the sum which they shall gain for the
relief of their families, and the respite which their wages will enable
them to enjoy; but, upon their return, they find their hopes blasted,
and their contracts dissolved by a law made in their absence.

No human being, I think, can coolly and deliberately inflict a hardship
like this, and, therefore, I doubt not but those who have, by
inadvertency, given room for this objection, will either remove it by an
amendment, or what is, in my opinion, more eligible, reject the clause
as inexpedient, useless, and unjust.

Sir William YONGE spoke next to this effect:--Sir, this debate has been
protracted, not by any difficulties arising from the nature of the
questions which have been the subject of it, but by a neglect with which
almost all the opponents of the bill may be justly charged, the neglect
of distinguishing between measures eligible in themselves, and measures
preferable to consequences which are apprehended from particular
conjunctures; between laws made only to advance the publick happiness,
and expedients of which the benefit is merely occasional, and of which
the sole intention is to avert some national calamity, and which are to
cease with the necessity that produced them.

Such are the measures, sir, which are now intended; measures, which, in
days of ease, security, and prosperity, it would be the highest degree
of weakness to propose, but of which I cannot see the absurdity in times
of danger and distress. Such laws are the medicines of a state, useless
and nauseous in health, but preferable to a lingering disease, or to a
miserable death.

Even those measures, sir, which have been mentioned as most grossly
absurd, and represented as parallel t