in any manner influenced by malice or a desire of revenge? To this, my Lords, I answer, because we would be thought to know our duty, and to have all the world know how resolutely we are resolved to perform it. The Commons of Great Britain are not disposed to quarrel with the Divine Wisdom and Goodness, which has moulded up revenge into the frame and constitution of man. He that has made us what we are, has made us at once resentful and reasonable. Instinct tells a man, that he ought to revenge an injury; reason tells him, that he ought not to be a judge in his own cause. From that moment revenge passes from the private to the publick hand; but in being transferred it is far from being extinguished. My Lords, it

is transferred as a sacred trust to be exercised for the injured, in measure and proportion by persons who, feeling as he feels, are in a temper to reason better than he can reason. Revenge is taken out of the hands of the original injured proprietor, lest it should be carried beyond the bounds of moderation and justice. But, my Lords, it is in its transfer exposed to a danger of an opposite description. The delegate of vengeance may not feel the wrong sufficiently; he may be cold and languid in the performance of his sacred duty. It is for these reasons, that good men are taught to tremble

even at the first emotions of anger and resentment for their own particular wrongs; but they are likewise taught, if they are well taught, to give the loosest possible rein to their resentment and indignation, whenever their parents, their friends, their country or their brethren of the common family of mankind are injured. Those, who have not such feelings under such circumstances, are base and degenerate. These, my Lords, are the sentiments of the Commons of Great Britain.

Lord Bacon has very well said, that "revenge " is a kind of wild justice." It is so, and without this wild austere stock, there would be no justice in the world. But when by the skilful hand of morality and wise jurisprudence a foreign scion, but of the very same species, is grafted upon it, its harsh quality becomes changed, it submits to culture, and laying aside its savage nature it bears fruits and flowers, sweet to the world, and not ungrateful even to Heaven itself, to which it elevates its exalted head. The fruit of this wild stock is revenge, regulated, but not extinguished; revenge transferred from the suffering party to the communion and sympathy of mankind. This is the revenge by which we are actuated, and which we should be sorry if the false, idle, girlish, novel-like morality of the world should extin

guish in the breast of us, who have a great publick duty to perform.

This sympathetick revenge, which is condemned by clamourous imbecility, is so far from being a vice, that it is the greatest of all possible virtues; a virtue which the uncorrupted judgment of mankind has in all ages exalted to the rank of heroism. To give up all the repose and pleasures of life, to pass sleepless nights, and laborious days, and, what is ten times more irksome to an ingenuous mind, to offer oneself to calumny and all its herd of hissing tongues and poisoned fangs, in order to free the world from fraudulent prevaricators, from cruel oppressors, from robbers and tyrants, has I say the test of heroick virtue, and well deserves such a distinction. The Commons, despairing to attain the heights of this virtue, never lose sight of it for a moment. For seventeen years they have, almost without intermission, pursued, by every sort of inquiry, by legislative and by judicial remedy, the cure of this Indian malady, worse ten thousand times than the leprosy which our forefathers brought from the East. Could they have done this, if they had not been actuated by some strong, some vehement, some perennial passion, which burning like the vestal fire, chaste and eternal, never suffers generous sympathy to grow cold

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in maintaining the rights of the injured, or in denouncing the crimes of the oppressor?

My Lords, the Managers for the Commons. have been actuated by this passion; my Lords, they feel its influence at this moment; and so far from softening either their measures or their tone, they do here, in the presence of their Creator, of this House, and of the world, make this solemn declaration, and nuncupate this deliberate vow; that they will ever glow with the most determined and unextinguishable animosity against tyranny, oppression and peculation in all, but more particularly as practised by this man in India; that they never will relent, but will pursue and prosecute him and it, till they see corrupt pride prostrate under the feet of justice. We call upon your Lordships to join us; and we have no doubt that you will feel the same sympathy that we feel, or (what I cannot persuade my soul to think, or my mouth to utter,) you will be identified with the Criminal whose crimes you excuse, and rolled with him in all the pollution of Indian guilt, from generation to generation. Let those who feel with me upon this occasion join with me in this vow; if they will not, I have it all to myself.

It is not to defend ourselves, that I have addressed your Lordships at such length on this subject. No, my Lords; I have said what I considered

I considered necessary to instruct the publick, upon the principles which induced the House of Commons to persevere in this business with a generous warmth, and in the indignant language which nature prompts, when great crimes are brought before men who feel as they ought to feel upon such occasions.

I now proceed, my Lords, to the next recriminatory charge, which is delay. I confess I am not astonished at this charge. From the first records of human impatience, down to the present time, it has been complained that the march of violence and oppression is rapid; but that the progress of remedial and vindictive justice, even the divine, has almost always favoured the appearance of being languid and sluggish. Something of this is owing to the very nature and constitution of human affairs; because, as justice is a circumspect, cautious, scrutinizing, balancing principle, full of doubt even of itself, and fearful of doing wrong even to the greatest wrong-doers, in the nature of things its movements must be slow, in comparison with the headlong rapidity with which avarice, ambition, and revenge, pounce down upon the devoted prey of those violent and destructive passions. And indeed, my Lords, the disproportion between crime and justice, when seen in the particular acts of either, would be so much to the VOL. XV. advantage

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