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state of our army abroad is in part known. No man more highly esteems and honours the British troops than I do; I know their virtues and their valour; I know they can achieve any thing but impossibilities; and I know that the conquest of British America is an impossibility. You cannot, my Lords, you can not conquer America. What is your present situation there? We do not know the worst; but we know that in three campaigns we have done nothing, and suffered much. You may swell every expense, accumulate every assistance, and extend your traffic to the shambles of every German despot: your attempts will be for ever vain and impotentdoubly so, indeed, from this mercenary aid on which you rely; for it irritates, to an incurable resentment, the minds of your adversaries, to over-run them with the mercenary sons of rapine and plunder, devoting them and their possessions to the rapacity of hireling cruelty. If I were an American, as I am an Englishman, while a foreign troop was landed in my country, I never would lay down my arms;-never, never, never!

But, my Lords, who is the man, that, in addition to the disgraces and mischiefs of the war, has dared to authorize and associate to our arms the tomahawk and scalping-knife of the savage?—to call into civilized alliance, the wild and inhuman inhabitant of the woods?-to delegate, to the merciless Indian, the defence of disputed rights, and to wage the horrors of his barbarous war against our brethren? My Lords, these enormities cry aloud for redress and punishment. But, my Lords, this barbarous measure has been defended, not only on the principles of policy and necessity, but also on those of morality; "for it is perfectly allowable," says Lord Suffolk, "to use all the means, which God and nature have put into our hands." I am astonished, I am shocked, to hear such principles confessed; to hear them avowed in this house, or in this country. My Lords, I did not intend to encroach so much on your attention, but I cannot repress my indignation-I feel myself impelled to speak. My Lords, we are called upon, as members of this house, as men, as Christians, to protest against such horrible barbarity!-"That God and nature have put into our hands!" What ideas of God and nature that noble Lord may entertain, I know not; but I know, that such detestable principles are equally abhorrent to religion and humanity. What! to attribute the sacred sanction of God and nature to the massacres of the Indian scalping-knife!-to the cannibal savage, torturing, murdering, devouring, drinking the blood

of his mangled victims! Such notions shock every precept of morality, every feeling of humanity, every sentiment of honour. These abominable principles, and this more abominable avowal of them, demand the most decisive indignation.

I call upon that Right Reverend, and this most Learned Bench, to vindicate the religion of their God-to support the justice of their country. I call upon the bishops, to interpose the unsullied sanctity of their lawn;-upon the judges, to interpose the purity of their ermine, to save us from this pollution. I call upon the honour of your Lordships to reverence the dignity of your ancestors, and to maintain your own. I call upon the spirit and humanity of my country, to vindicate the national character. I invoke the Genius of the Constitution! From the tapestry that adorns these walls, the immortal ancestor of this noble lord frowns with indignation at the disgrace of his country. To send forth the merciless cannibal, thirsting for blood! Against whom?—your brethren! -to lay waste their country, to desolate their dwellings, and extirpate their race and name, by the aid and instrumentality of these horrible hounds of war! Spain can no longer boast pre-eminence in barbarity. She armed herself with bloodhounds, to extirpate the wretched natives of Mexico; we, more ruthless, loose these dogs of war against our countrymen in America, endeared to us by every tie that can sanctify humanity. I solemnly call upon your Lordships, and upon every order of men in the state, to stamp, upon this infamous procedure, the indelible stigma of the Public Abhorrence. More particularly, I call upon the holy prelates of our religion to do away this iniquity; let them perform a lustration, to purify the country from this deep and deadly sin.

III.-LORD MANSFIELD, ON PRIVILEGE OF PARLIAMENT.

MY LORDS-When I consider the importance of this bill to your lordships, I am not surprised it has taken up so much of your consideration. It is a bill, indeed, of no common magnitude; it is no less than to take away, from two-thirds of the legislative body of this great kingdom, certain privileges and immunities, of which they have been long possessed. Perhaps there is no situation in which the human mind can be placed, that is so difficult and trying, as when it is made a judge in its own cause. There is something in the breast of man, so attached to self, so tenacious of privileges once obtained; that, in such a situation, either to discuss with

impartiality, or decide with justice, has ever been held as the sunimit of all human virtue. The bill now in question puts your Lordships in this very predicament; and I doubt not but the wisdom of your decision will convince the world, that, where self-interest and justice are in opposite scales, the latter will ever preponderate with your Lordships.

This bill has been frequently proposed, and as frequently miscarried; but it was always lost in the Lower House. Little did I think, when it had passed the Commons, that it possibly could have met with such opposition here. Shall it be said, that you, my Lords, the grand council of the nation, the highest judicial and legislative body in the realm,-endeavour to evade, by privilege, those very laws which you enforce on your fellow-subjects? Forbid it, Justice!-I am sure, were the noble lords as well acquainted as I am with but half the difficulties and delays occasioned in the courts of justice, under pretence of privilege, they would not, nay, they could not, oppose this bill.

I come now to speak upon what indeed I would have gladly avoided, had I not been particularly pointed at for the part I have taken in this bill. It has been said by a noble lord on my left hand, that I likewise am running the race of popularity. If the noble lord means, by popularity, that applause bestowed by after-ages on good and virtuous actions, I have long been struggling in that race; to what purpose, all-trying time can alone determine: but, if the noble lord means that mushroom popularity which is raised without merit, and lost without crime, he is much mistaken in his opinion. I defy the noble lord to point out a single action of my life, in which the popularity of the times ever had the smallest influence on my determinations. I have a more permanent and steady rule for my conduct, the dictates of my own breast. Those that have foregone that pleasing adviser, and given up their minds to be the slave of every popular impulse, I sincerely pity: I pity them still more, if their vanity leads them to mistake the shouts of a mob for the trumpet of fame. Experience might inform them that many, who have been saluted with the huzzas of a crowd one day, have received its execrations the next; and many who, by the popularity of their times, have been held up as spotless patriots, have, nevertheless, appeared upon the historian's page,-when truth has triumphed over delusion, the assassins of liberty.

True liberty, in my opinion, can only exist when justice is equally administered to all-to the king and to the beggar.

Where is the justice, then, or where is the law, that protects a member of parliament more than any other man from the punishment due to his crimes? The laws of this country allow of no place, and no employment, to be a sanctuary for crimes; and where I have the honour to sit as judge, neither royal favour nor popular applause shall ever protect the guilty.

IV. MR. GRATTAN, ON THE NATIONAL GRIEVANCES.

PARLIAMENT is not a bigot-you are no sectary, no polemic; it is your duty to unite all men, to manifest brotherly love and confidence to all men. The parental sentiment is the true principle of government. Men are ever finally disposed to be governed by the instrument of their happiness. The mystery of government, would you learn it? look on the Gospel, and make the source of your redemption the rule of your authority; and, like the hen in the Scripture, expand your wings, and take in all the people.

Let bigotry and schism, the zealot's fire, and the high priest's intolerance, through all their discordancy tremble; while an enlightened parliament, with arms of general protection, overarches the whole community. Laws of coercion (perhaps necessary, certainly severe) you have put forth already, but your great engine of power you have hitherto kept back; that engine, which the pride of the bigot, or the spite of the zealot, or the ambition of the high, or the arsenal of the conqueror, or the Inquisition, with its jaded rack and pale criminal, never thought of; the engine, which, armed with physical and moral blessings, comes forth, and overlays mankind with servicesthe engine of redress; this is government, and this the only description of government worth your ambition. Were I to raise you to a great act, I should not recur to the history of other nations; I would recite your own acts, and set you in emulation with yourselves. Do you remember that night when you gave your country a free trade, and with your hands opened all her harbours? That night, when you gave her a free constitution, and broke the chains of a century while England stood eclipsed by your glory, and your island rose, as it were, from its bed, and got nearer the sun? In the arts that polish life-the inventions that accommodate, the manufactures that adorn it, you will be for many years inferior to some other parts of Europe; but, to nurse a growing people, to mature a struggling, though hardy community; to mould, to multiply, to consolidate, to inspire, and to exalt a young nation; be these your barbarous accomplishments!

V.-LORD ERSKINE, IN FAVOUR OF MR. HARDY.

GENTLEMEN-If precedents in bad times are to be followed, why should the Lords and Commons have investigated these charges, and the crown have put them into this course of judicial trial? since, without such a trial, and even after an acquittal upon one, they might have attainted all the prisoners by act of parliament: they did so in the case of Lord Strafford. There are precedents, therefore, for all such things; but such precedents as could not, for a moment, survive the times of madness and distraction which gave them birth; but which, as soon as the spurs of the occasion were blunted, were repealed and execrated even by parliaments, which, little as I think of the present, ought not to be compared with it; parliaments sitting in the darkness of former times-in the night of freedom-before the principles of government were developed, and before the constitution became fixed. The last of these precedents, and all the proceedings upon it, were ordered to be taken off the file and burned, to the intent that the same might no longer be visible in after-ages: an order dictated, no doubt, by a pious tenderness for national honour, and meant as a charitable covering for the crimes of our fathers. But it was a sin against posterity, it was a treason against society; for, instead of commanding them to be burned, they should rather have directed them to be blazoned, in large letters, upon the walls of our courts of justice; that, like the characters deciphered by the Prophet to the Eastern tyrant, they might enlarge and blacken in your sights, to terrify you from acts of injustice.

In times, when the whole habitable earth is in a state of change and fluctuation; when deserts are starting up into civilized empires around you; and when men-no longer slaves to the prejudices of particular countries, much less to the abuses of particular governments-enlist themselves, like the citizens of an enlightened world, into whatever communities their civil liberties may be best protected; it never can be for the advantage of this country to prove that the strict, unextended letter of her laws, is no security to her inhabitants. On the contrary, when so dangerous a hire is everywhere holding out to emigration, it will be found to be the wisest policy of Great Britain to set up her happy constitution the strict letter of her guardian laws, and the proud condition of equal freedom, which her highest and her lowest subjects ought alike to enjoy;-it will be her wisest policy,

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