r good governors. It is by
this tribunal that statesmen who abuse their power are accused by
statesmen and tried by statesmen, not upon the niceties of a narrow
jurisprudence, but upon the enlarged and solid principles of state
morality. It is here that those who by the abuse of power have violated
the spirit of law can never hope for protection from any of its forms;
it is here that those who have refused to conform themselves to its
perfections can never hope to escape through any of its defects. It
ought, therefore, my Lords, to become our common care to guard this your
precious deposit, rare in its use, but powerful in its effect, with a
religious vigilance, and never to suffer it to be either discredited or
antiquated. For this great end your Lordships are invested with great
and plenary powers: but you do not suspend, you do not supersede, you do
not annihilate any subordinate jurisdiction; on the contrary, you are
auxiliary and supplemental to them all.

Whether it is owing to the felicity of our times, less fertile in great
offences than those which have gone before us, or whether it is from a
sluggish apathy which has dulled and enervated the public justice, I am
not called upon to determine,--but, whatever may be the cause, it is now
sixty-three years since any impeachment, grounded upon abuse of
authority and misdemeanor in office, has come before this tribunal. The
last is that of Lord Macclesfield, which happened in the year 1725. So
that the oldest process known to the Constitution of this country has,
upon its revival, some appearance of novelty. At this time, when all
Europe is in a state of, perhaps, contagious fermentation, when
antiquity has lost all its reverence and all its effect on the minds of
men, at the same time that novelty is still attended with the suspicions
that always will be attached to whatever is new, we have been anxiously
careful, in a business which seems to combine the objections both to
what is antiquated and what is novel, so to conduct ourselves that
nothing in the revival of this great Parliamentary process shall afford
a pretext for its future disuse.

My Lords, strongly impressed as they are with these sentiments, the
Commons have conducted themselves with singular care and caution.
Without losing the spirit and zeal of a public prosecution, they have
comported themselves with such moderation, temper, and decorum as would
not have ill become the final judgment, if with them