ormous
sum of perhaps four millions of sterling money.

It is difficult for the most wise and upright government to correct the
abuses of remote, delegated power, productive of unmeasured wealth, and
protected by the boldness and strength of the same ill-got riches. These
abuses, full of their own wild native vigor, will grow and flourish
under mere neglect. But where the supreme authority, not content with
winking at the rapacity of its inferior instruments, is so shameless and
corrupt as openly to give bounties and premiums for disobedience to its
laws,--when it will not trust to the activity of avarice in the pursuit
of its own gains,--when it secures public robbery by all the careful
jealousy and attention with which it ought to protect property from such
violence,--the commonwealth then is become totally perverted from its
purposes; neither God nor man will long endure it; nor will it long
endure itself. In that case, there is an unnatural infection, a
pestilential taint, fermenting in the constitution of society, which
fever and convulsions of some kind or other must throw off, or in which
the vital powers, worsted in an unequal struggle, are pushed back upon
themselves, and, by a reversal of their whole functions, fester to
gangrene, to death,--and instead of what was but just now the delight
and boast of the creation, there will be cast out in the face of the sun
a bloated, putrid, noisome carcass, full of stench and poison, an
offence, a horror, a lesson to the world.

In my opinion, we ought not to wait for the fruitless instruction of
calamity to inquire into the abuses which bring upon us ruin in the
worst of its forms, in the loss of our fame and virtue. But the right
honorable gentleman[66] says, in answer to all the powerful arguments of
my honorable friend, "that this inquiry is of a delicate nature, and
that the state will suffer detriment by the exposure of this
transaction." But it is exposed; it is perfectly known in every member,
in every particle, and in every way, except that which may lead to a
remedy. He knows that the papers of correspondence are printed, and that
they are in every hand.

He and delicacy are a rare and a singular coalition. He thinks that to
divulge our Indian politics may be highly dangerous. He! the mover, the
chairman, the reporter of the Committee of Secrecy! he, that brought
forth in the utmost detail, in several vast, printed folios, the most
recondite parts of the pol