may hinder the effects of the
best laws. The magistrates may be vitious, and forbear to enforce that
law, by which themselves are condemned; they may be indolent, and
inclined rather to connive at wickedness by which they are not injured
themselves, than to repress it by a laborious exertion of their
authority; or they may be timorous, and, instead of awing the vitious,
may be awed by them.

In any of these cases, my lords, the law is not to be condemned for
its inefficacy, since it only fails by the defect of those who are to
direct its operations; the best and most important laws will
contribute very little to the security or happiness of a people, if no
judges of integrity and spirit can be found amongst them. Even the
most beneficial and useful bill that ministers can possibly imagine, a
bill for laying on our estates a tax of the fifth part of their yearly
value, would be wholly without effect, if collectors could not be
obtained.

I am, therefore, my lords, yet doubtful, whether the inefficacy of the
law now subsisting necessarily obliges us to provide another; for
those that declared it to be useless, owned at the same time, that no
man endeavoured to enforce it; so that, perhaps, its only defect may
be, that it will not execute itself.

Nor though I should allow, that the law is at present impeded by
difficulties which cannot be broken through, but by men of more spirit
and dignity than the ministers may be inclined to trust with
commissions of the peace, yet it can only be collected, that another
law is necessary, not that the law now proposed will be of any
advantage.

Great use has been made of the inefficacy of the present law to decry
the proposal made by the noble lord for laying a high duty upon these
pernicious liquors. High duties have already, as we are informed, been
tried without advantage; high duties are at this hour imposed upon
those spirits which are retailed, yet we see them every day sold in
the streets without the payment of the tax required; and, therefore,
it will be folly to make a second essay of means which have been
found, by the experience of many years, unsuccessful.

It has been granted on all sides in this debate, nor was it ever
denied on any other occasion, that the consumption of any commodity is
most easily to be hindered by raising its price, and its price is to
be raised by the imposition of a duty; this, my lords, which is, I
suppose, the opinion of every man, of whate