to do it,--at this very moment, when he was turning over fourteen
hundred of the ancient nobility and gentry of this country to downright
want of bread,--just at that moment, while he was doing this act, and
feeling this act in this manner, from the collected morsels forced from
the mouths of that indigent and famished nobility he gorged his own
ravenous maw with an allowance of two hundred pounds a day for his
entertainment. As we see him in this business, this man is unlike any
other: he is also never corrupt but he is cruel; he never dines without
creating a famine; he does not take from the loose superfluity of
standing greatness, but falls upon the indigent, the oppressed, and
ruined; he takes to himself double what would maintain them. His is
unlike the generous rapacity of the noble eagle, who preys upon a
living, struggling, reluctant, equal victim; his is like that of the
ravenous vulture, who falls upon the decayed, the sickly, the dying, and
the dead, and only anticipates Nature in the destruction of its object.
His cruelty is beyond his corruption: but there is something in his
hypocrisy which is more terrible than his cruelty; for, at the very time
when with double and unsparing hands he executes a proscription, and
sweeps off the food of hundreds of the nobility and gentry of a great
country, his eyes overflow with tears, and he turns the precious balm
that bleeds from wounded humanity, and is its best medicine, into fatal,
rancorous, mortal poison to the human race.

You have seen, that, when he takes two hundred pounds a day for his
entertainment, he tells you that in this very act he is starving
fourteen hundred of the ancient nobility and gentry. My Lords, you have
the blood of nobles,--if not, you have the blood of men in your veins:
you feel as nobles, you feel as men. What would you say to a cruel Mogul
exactor, by whom after having been driven from your estates, driven from
the noble offices, civil and military, which you hold, driven from your
bishoprics, driven from your places at court, driven from your offices
as judges, and, after having been reduced to a miserable flock of
pensioners, your very pensions were at last wrested from your mouths,
and who, though at the very time when those pensions were wrested from
you he declares them to have been the only bread of a miserable decayed
nobility, takes himself two hundred pounds a day for his entertainment,
and continues it till it amounts to sixte