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to look to the nature of things than to the hu- | mours of men. The very attempt towards pleasing every body discovers a temper always flashy, and often false and insincere. Therefore, as I have proceeded straight onward in my conduct, so I will proceed in my account of those parts of it which have been most excepted to. But I must first beg leave just to hint to you, that we may suffer very great detriment by being open to every talker. It is not to be imagined, how much of service is lost from spirits full of activity, and full of energy, who are pressing, who are rushing forward, to great and capital objects, when you oblige them to be continually looking back. Whilst they are defending one service, they defraud you of an hundred. Applaud us when we run; console us when we fall; cheer us when we recover; but let us pass on-for God's sake let us pass on.

Do you think, gentlemen, that every publick act in the six years since I stood in this place before you that all the arduous things which have been done in this eventful period, which has crowded into a few years' space the revolutions of an age, can be opened to you on their fair grounds in half an hour's conversation.

But it is no reason, because there is a bad mode of inquiry, that there should be no examination at all. Most certainly it is our duty to examine; it is our interest too-But it must be with discretion; with an attention to all the circumstances, and to all the motives: like sound judges, and not like cavilling pettyfoggers and quibbling pleaders, prying into flaws and hunting for exceptions. Look, gentlemen, to the whole tenour of your member's conduct. Try whether his ambition or his avarice have justled him out of the straight line of duty; or whether that grand foe of the offices of active life, that master-vice in men of business, a degenerate and inglorious sloth, has made him flag and languish in his course? This is the object of our enquiry. If our member's conduct can bear this touch, mark it for sterling. He may have fallen into errours; he must have faults; but our errour is greater, and our fault is radically ruinous to ourselves, if we do not bear, if we do not even applaud, the whole compound and mixed mass of such a character. Not to act thus is folly; I had almost said it is impiety. He censures God, who quarrels with the imperfections of man.

Gentlemen, we must not be peevish with those who serve the people. For none will serve us whilst there is a court to serve, but those who are of a nice and jealous honour. They who think every thing, in comparison of that honour, to be dust and ashes, will not bear to have it soiled and impaired by those, for whose sake they make a thousand sacrifices to preserve it immaculate and whole. We shall either drive such men from the publick stage, or we shall send them to the court for protection: where, if they must sacrifice their reputation, they will at least secure their interest. Depend upon it, that the lovers of freedom will be free. None will violate their conscience to

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please us, in order afterwards to discharge that conscience, which they have violated, by doing us faithful and affectionate service. If we degrade and deprave their minds by servility, it will be absurd to expect, that they who are creeping and abject towards us, will ever be bold and incorruptible assertors of our freedom, against the most seducing and the most formidable of all powNo! human nature is not so formed; nor shall we improve the faculties or better the morals of publick men, by our possession of the most infallible receipt in the world for making cheats and hypocrites.

ers.

Let me say with plainness, I who am no longer in a publick character, that if by a fair, by an indulgent, by a gentlemanly behaviour to our representatives, we do not give confidence to their minds, and a liberal scope to their understandings; if we do not permit our members to act upon a very enlarged view of things; we shall at length infallibly degrade our national representation into a confused and scuffling bustle of local agency. When the popular member is narrowed in his ideas, and rendered timid in his proceedings, the service of the crown will be the sole nursery of statesmen. Among the frolicks of the court, it may at length take that of attending to its business. Then the monopoly of mental power will be added to the power of all other kinds it possesses. On the side of the people there will be nothing but impotence: for ignorance is impotence; narrowness of mind is impotence; timidity is itself impotence, and makes all other qualities that go along with it, impotent and useless.

At present it is the plan of the court to make its servants insignificant. If the people should fall into the same humour, and should choose their servants on the same principles of mere obsequiousness, and flexibility, and total vacancy or indifference of opinion in all publick matters, then no part of the state will be sound; and it will be in vain to think of saving it.

I thought it very expedient at this time to give you this candid counsel; and with this counsel I would willingly close, if the matters which at various times have been objected to me in this city concerned only myself, and my own election. These charges, I think, are four in number;-my neglect of a due attention to my constituents, the not paying more frequent visits here;-my conduct on the affairs of the first Irish trade acts;my opinion and mode of proceeding on Lord Beauchamp's debtors bills; and my votes on the late affairs of the Roman Catholicks. All of these (except perhaps the first) relate to matters of very considerable publick concern; and it is not lest you should censure me improperly, but lest you should form improper opinions on matters of some moment to you, that I trouble you at all upon the subject. My conduct is of small importance.

With regard to the first charge, my friends have spoken to me of it in the style of amicable expostulation; not so much blaming the thing, as lamenting the effects.-Others, less partial to me,

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sweated in the house of commons-by the most easy and ordinary arts of election, by dinners and visits, by "How do you do's," and "My worthy friends," I was to be quietly moved out of my seat-and promises were made, and engagements entered into, without any exception or reserve, as my laborious zeal in my duty had been a regular abdication of my trust.

were less kind in assigning the motives. I admit,
there is a decorum and propriety in a member of
parliament's paying a respectful court to his con-
stituents. If I were conscious to myself that plea-
sure or dissipation, or low unworthy occupations,
had detained me from personal attendance on you,
I would readily admit my fault, and quietly sub-if
mit to the penalty. But, gentlemen, I live at an
hundred miles distance from Bristol; and at the
end of a session I come to my own house, fatigued
in body and in mind, to a little repose, and to a
very little attention to my family and my private
concerns. A visit to Bristol is always a sort of
canvass; else it will do more harm than good. To
pass from the toils of a session to the toils of a
canvass, is the furthest thing in the world from
repose. I could hardly serve you as I have done,
and court you too. Most of you have heard, that
I do not very remarkably spare myself in publick
business; and in the private business of my con-
stituents I have done very nearly as much as those
who have nothing else to do. My canvass of you
was not on the 'change, nor in the county meetings,
nor in the clubs of this city: It was in the house
of commons; it was at the custom-house; it was
at the council; it was at the treasury; it was at the
admiralty. I canvassed you through your affairs,
and not your persons. I was not only your repre-
sentative as a body; I was the agent, the solicitor
of individuals; I ran about wherever your affairs
could call me; and in acting for you, I often ap-
peared rather as a ship broker, than as a member
of parliament. There was nothing too laborious
or too low for me to undertake. The meanness
of the business was raised by the dignity of the
object. If some lesser matters have slipped through
my fingers, it was because I filled my hands too
full; and, in my eagerness to serve you, took in
more than any hands could grasp. Several gentle-
men stand round me who are my willing witnesses;
and there are others who, if they were here,
would be still better; because they would be
unwilling witnesses to the same truth. It was in
the middle of a summer residence in London, and
in the middle of a negociation at the admiralty
for your trade, that I was called to Bristol; and
this late visit, at this late day, has been possibly
in prejudice to your affairs.

Since I have touched upon this matter, let me say, gentlemen, that if I had a disposition or a right to complain, I have some cause of complaint on my side. With a petition of the city in my hand, passed through the corporation without a dissenting voice, a petition in unison with almost the whole voice of the kingdom, (with whose formal thanks I was covered over,) while I laboured on no less than five bills for a publick reform, and fought against the opposition of great abilities, and of the greatest power, every clause, and every word of the largest of those bills, almost to the very last day of a very long session; all this time a canvass in Bristol was as calmly carried on as if I were dead. I was considered as a man wholly out of the question. Whilst I watched, and fasted, and

To open my whole heart to you on this subject, I do confess, however, that there were other times besides the two years in which I did visit you, when I was not wholly without leisure for repeating that mark of my respect. But I could not bring my mind to see you. You remember, that in the beginning of this American war (that æra of calamity, disgrace, and downfall, an era which no feeling mind will ever mention without a tear for England) you were greatly divided; and a very strong body, if not the strongest, opposed itself to the madness which every art and every power were employed to render popular in order that the errours of the rulers might be lost in the general blindness of the nation. This opposition continued until after our great, but most unfortunate, victory at Long Island. Then all the mounds and banks of our constancy were borne down at once; and the phrensy of the American war broke in upon us like a deluge. This victory, which seemed to put an immediate end to all difficulties, perfected us in that spirit of domination, which our unparalleled prosperity had but too long nurtured. We had been so very powerful, and so very prosperous, that even the humblest of us were degraded into the vices and follies of kings. We lost all measure between means and ends; and our headlong desires became our politicks and our morals. All men who wished for peace, or retained any sentiments of moderation, were overborne or silenced; and this city was led by every artifice (and probably with the more management, because I was one of your members) to distinguish itself by its zeal for that fatal cause. In this temper of your and of my mind, I should have sooner fled to the extremities of the earth, than have shewn myself here. I, who saw in every American victory (for you have had a long series of these misfortunes) the germ and seed of the naval power of France and Spain, which all our heat and warmth against America was only hatching into life,-I should not have been a welcome visitant with the brow and the language of such feelings. When, afterwards, the other face of your calamity was turned upon you, and shewed itself in defeat and distress, I shunned you full as much. I felt sorely this variety in our wretchedness; and I did not wish to have the least appearance of insulting you with that show of superiority, which, though it may not be assumed, is generally suspected in a time of calamity, from those whose previous warnings have been despised. I could not bear to shew you a representative whose face did not reflect that of his constituents; a face that could not joy in your joys, and sorrow in your sorrows. But time at length has made us all of one opinion; and we

have all opened our eyes on the true nature of the American war, to the true nature of all its successes and all its failures.

uneasiness, was, after a considerable progress through the house, thrown out by him.

What was the consequence? The whole king

In that publick storm too I had my private feel-dom of Ireland was instantly in a flame. Threatings. I had seen blown down and prostrate on the ground several of those houses to whom I was chiefly indebted for the honour this city has done me. I confess, that, whilst the wounds of those I loved were yet green, I could not bear to shew myself in pride and triumph in that place into which their partiality had brought me, and to appear at feasts and rejoicings, in the midst of the grief and calamity of my warm friends, my zealous supporters, my generous benefactors. This is a true, unvarnished, undisguised state of the affair. You will judge of it.

This is the only one of the charges in which I am personally concerned. As to the other matters objected against me, which in their turn I shall mention to you, remember once more I do not mean to extenuate or excuse. Why should I, when the things charged are among those upon which I found all my reputation? What would be left to me, if I myself was the man, who softened, and blended, and diluted, and weakened, all the distinguishing colours of my life, so as to leave nothing distinct and determinate in my whole conduct?

It has been said, and it is the second charge, that in the questions of the Irish trade, I did not consult the interest of my constituents; or, to speak out strongly, that I rather acted as a native of Ireland, than as an English member of parlia

ment.

ened by foreigners, and, as they thought, insulted by England, they resolved at once to resist the power of France, and to cast off yours. As for us, we were able neither to protect nor to restrain them. Forty thousand men were raised and disciplined without commission from the crown. Two illegal armies were seen with banners displayed at the same time and in the same country. No executive magistrate, no judicature in Ireland, would acknowledge the legality of the army which bore the king's commission; and no law, or appearance of law, authorized the army commissioned by itself. In this unexampled state of things, which the least errour, the least trespass on the right or left, would have hurried down the precipice into an abyss of blood and confusion, the people of Ireland demand a freedom of trade with arms in their hands. They interdict all commerce between the two nations. They deny all new supply in the house of commons, although in time of war. They stint the trust of the old revenue, given for two years to all the king's predecessors, to six months. The British parliament, in a former session, frightened into a limited concession by the menaces of Ireland, frightened out of it by the menaces of England, were now frightened back again, and made an universal surrender of all that had been thought the peculiar, reserved, uncommunicable rights of England;-the exclusive commerce of America, of Africa, of the West I certainly have very warm, good wishes for the Indies-all the enumerations of the acts of naviplace of my birth. But the sphere of my duties gation-all the manufactures-iron, glass, even the is my true country. It was, as a man attached to last pledge of jealousy and pride, the interest hid your interests, and zealous for the conservation of in the secret of our hearts, the inveterate prejuyour power and dignity, that I acted on that dice moulded into the constitution of our frame, occasion, and on all occasions. You were in- even the sacred fleece itself, all went together. No volved in the American war. A new world of reserve; no exception; no debate; no discussion, policy was opened, to which it was necessary we A sudden light broke in upon us all. It broke in, should conform, whether we would or not; and not through well- contrived and well-disposed winmy only thought was how to conform to our situa-dows, but through flaws and breaches; through tion in such a manner as to unite to this kingdom, in prosperity and in affection, whatever remained of the empire. I was true to my old, standing, invariable principle, that all things, which came from Great Britain, should issue as a gift of her bounty and beneficence, rather than as claims recovered against a struggling litigant; or at least, that if your beneficence obtained no credit in your concessions, yet that they should appear the salutary provisions of your wisdom and foresight; not as things wrung from you with your blood by the cruel gripe of a rigid necessity. The first concessions, by being (much against my will) mangled and stripped of the parts which were necessary to make out their just correspondence and connexion in trade, were of no use. The next year a feeble attempt was made to bring the thing into better shape. This attempt (countenanced by the minister) on the very first appearance of some popular * Irish perpetual mutiny act.

the yawning chasms of our ruin. We were taught wisdom by humiliation. No town in England presumed to have a prejudice; or dared to mutter a petition. What was worse, the whole parliament of England, which retained authority for nothing but surrenders, was despoiled of every shadow of its superintendence. It was, without any qualification, denied in theory, as it had been trampled upon in practice. This scene of shame and disgrace has, in a manner whilst I am speaking, ended by the perpetual establishment of a military power in the dominions of this crown, without consent of the British legislature,* contrary to the policy of the constitution, contrary to the declaration of right: and by this your liberties are swept away along with your supreme authority-and both, linked together from the beginning, have, I am afraid, both together perished, for ever.

What! gentlemen, was I not to foresee, or foreseeing, was I not to endeavour to save you from all these multiplied mischiefs and disgraces? Would the little, silly, canvass prattle of obeying instructions, and having no opinions but yours, and such idle senseless tales, which amuse the vacant ears of unthinking men, have saved you from "the pelting of that pitiless storm," to which the loose improvidence, the cowardly rashness, of those who dare not look danger in the face, so as to provide against it in time, and therefore throw themselves headlong into the midst of it, have exposed this degraded nation, beaten down and prostrate on the earth, unsheltered, unarmed, unresisting? Was I an Irishman on that day, that I boldly withstood our pride? or on the day that I hung down my head, and wept in shame and silence over the humiliation of Great Britain? I became unpopular in England for the one, and in Ireland for the other. What then? What obligation lay on me to be popular? I was bound to serve both kingdoms. To be pleased with my service, was their affair, not mine.

I was an Irishman in the Irish business, just as much as I was an American, when, on the same principles, I wished you to concede to America, at a time when she prayed concession at our feet. Just as much was I an American, when I wished parliament to offer terms in victory, and not to wait the well chosen hour of defeat, for making good by weakness, and by supplication, a claim of prerogative, pre-eminence, and authority.

Instead of requiring it from me, as a point of duty, to kindle with your passions, had you all been as cool as I was, you would have been saved from disgraces and distresses that are unutterable. Do you remember our commission? We sent out a solemn embassy across the Atlantick ocean, to lay the crown, the peerage, the commons of Great Britain, at the feet of the American congress. That our disgrace might want no sort of brightening and burnishing, observe who they were that composed this famous embassy! My Lord Carlisle is among the first ranks of our nobility. He is the identical man who, but two years before, had been put forward, at the opening of a session in the house of lords, as the mover of a haughty and rigorous address against America. He was put in the front of the embassy of submission. Mr. Eden was taken from the office of Lord Suffolk, to whom he was then under secretary of state; from the office of that Lord Suffolk, who but a few weeks before, in his place in parliament, did not deign to inquire where a congress of vagrants was to be found. This Lord Suffolk sent Mr. Eden to find these vagrants, without knowing where this king's generals were to be found, who were joined in the same commission of supplicating those whom they were sent to subdue. They enter the capital of America only to abandon it; and these assertors and representatives of the dignity of England, at the tail of a flying army, let fly their Parthian shafts of memorials and remonstrances at random

Mr. Williams.

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behind them. Their promises and their offers, their flatteries and their menaces, were all despised; and we were saved from the disgrace of their formal reception, only because the congress scorned to receive them; whilst the state-house of independent Philadelphia opened her doors to the publick entry of the ambassador of France. From war and blood we went to submission; and from submission plunged back again to war and blood; to desolate and be desolated, without measure, hope, or end. I am a Royalist, I blushed for this degradation of the crown. I am a Whig, I blushed for the dishonour of parliament. I am a true Englishman, I felt to the quick for the disgrace of England. I am a man, I felt for the melancholy reverse of human affairs, in the fall of the first power in the world.

To read what was approaching in Ireland, in the black and bloody characters of the American war, was a painful, but it was a necessary, part of my publick duty. For, gentlemen, it is not your fond desires or mine that can alter the nature of things; by contending against which, what have we got, or shall ever get, but defeat and shame ? I did not obey your instructions: No. I conformed to the instructions of truth and nature, and maintained your interest, against your opinions, with a constancy that became me. A representative worthy of you ought to be a person of stability. I am to look, indeed, to your opinions; but to such opinions as you and I must have five years hence. I was not to look to the flash of the day. I knew that you chose me, in my place, along with others, to be a pillar of the state, and not a weathercock on the top of the edifice, exalted for my levity and versatility, and of no use but to indicate the shiftings of every fashionable gale. Would to God the value of my sentiments on Ireland and on America had been at this day a subject of doubt and discussion! No matter what my sufferings had been, so that this kingdom had kept the authority I wished it to maintain, by a grave foresight, and by an equitable temperance in the use of its power.

The next article of charge on my publick conduct, and that which I find rather the most prevalent of all, is, Lord Beauchamp's bill. I mean his bill of last session, for reforming the lawprocess concerning imprisonment. It is said, to aggravate the offence, that I treated the petition of this city with contempt even in presenting it to the house, and expressed myself in terms of marked disrespect. Had this latter part of the charge been true, no merits on the side of the question which I took could possibly excuse me. But I am incapable of treating this city with disrespect. Very fortunately, at this minute (if my bad eyesight does not deceive me) the worthy gentleman deputed on this business stands directly before me. To him I appeal, whether I did not, though it militated with my oldest and my most recent publick opinions, deliver the petition with a strong and more than usual recommendation to the con

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ought to be, the judge, is in reality no more than ministerial, a mere executive instrument of a private man, who is at once judge and party. Every idea of judicial order is subverted by this procedure. If the insolvency be no crime, why is it punished with arbitrary imprisonment? If it be a crime, why is it delivered into private hands to pardon without discretion, or to punish without mercy and without measure?

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sideration of the house, on account of the character and consequence of those who signed it. I believe the worthy gentleman will tell you, that the very day I received it, I applied to the solicitor, now the attorney general, to give it an immediate consideration; and he most obligingly and instantly consented to employ a great deal of his very valuable time to write an explanation of the bill. I attended the committee with all possible care and diligence, in order that every objection of yours To these faults, gross and cruel facts in our might meet with a solution; or produce an altera- law, the excellent principle of Lord Beauchamp's tion. I entreated your learned recorder (always bill applied some sort of remedy. I know that ready in business in which you take a concern) to credit must be preserved; but equity must be preattend. But what will you say to those who served too; and it is impossible that any thing blame me for supporting Lord Beauchamp's bill, should be necessary to commerce, which is inconas a disrespectful treatment of your petition, when sistent with justice. The principle of credit was you hear, that out of respect to you, I myself was not weakened by that bill. God forbid! The the cause of the loss of that very bill? For the enforcement of that credit was only put into the noble lord who brought it in, and who, I must same publick judicial hands on which we depend say, has much merit for this and some other mea- for our lives, and all that makes life dear to sures, at my request consented to put it off for a But, indeed, this business was taken up too week, which the speaker's illness lengthened to a warmly both here and elsewhere. The bill was fortnight; and then the frantick tumult about extremely mistaken. It was supposed to enact popery drove that and every rational business from what it never enacted; and complaints were made the house. So that if I choose to make a defence of clauses in it as novelties, which existed before of myself, on the little principles of a culprit, plead- the noble lord that brought in the bill was born. ing in his exculpation, I might not only secure my There was a fallacy that ran through the whole acquittal, but make merit with the opposers of the of the objections. The gentlemen who opposed bill. But I shall do no such thing. The truth is, the bill always argued, as if the option lay bethat I did occasion the loss of the bill, and by a tween that bill and the ancient law. But this is delay caused by my respect to you. But such an a grand mistake. For, practically, the option is event was never in my contemplation. And I am between, not that bill and the old law, but between so far from taking credit for the defeat of that that bill and those occasional laws, called acts of measure, that I cannot sufficiently lament my grace. For the operation of the old law is so misfortune, if but one man, who ought to be at savage, and so inconvenient to society, that for a large, has passed a year in prison by my means. long time past, once in every parliament, and lateam a debtor to the debtors. I confess judg-ly twice, the legislature has been obliged to make ment. I owe what, if ever it be in my power, I a general arbitrary jail-delivery, and at once to set shall most certainly pay,-ample atonement and open, by its sovereign authority, all the prisons in usurious amends to liberty and humanity for my England. unhappy lapse. For, gentlemen, Lord Beauchamp's bill was a law of justice and policy, as far as it went; I say as far as it went, for its fault was its being, in the remedial part, miserably defective.

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There are two capital faults in our law with relation to civil debts. One is, that every man is presumed solvent. A presumption, in innumerA presumption, in innumerable cases, directly against truth. Therefore the debtor is ordered, on a supposition of ability and fraud, to be coerced his liberty until he makes payment. By this means, in all cases of civil insolvency, without a pardon from his creditor, he is to be imprisoned for life :-and thus a miserable mistaken invention of artificial science operates to change a civil into a criminal judgment, and to scourge misfortune or indiscretion with a punishment which the law does not inflict on the greatest crimes.

The next fault is, that the inflicting of that punishment is not on the opinion of an equal and publick judge; but is referred to the arbitrary discretion of a private, nay interested, and irritated, individual. He, who formally is, and substantially

Gentlemen, I never relished acts of grace; nor ever submitted to them but from despair of better. They are a dishonourable invention, by which, not from humanity, not from policy, but merely because we have not room enough to hold these victims of the absurdity of our laws, we turn loose upon the publick three or four thousand naked wretches, corrupted by the habits, debased by the ignominy, of a prison. If the creditor had a right to those carcases as a natural security for his property, I am sure we have no right to deprive him of that security. But if the few pounds of flesh were not necessary to his security, we had not a right to detain the unfortunate debtor, without any benefit at all to the person who confined him. Take it as you will, we commit injustice. Now Lord Beauchamp's bill intended to do deliberately, and with great caution and circumspection, upon each several case, and with all attention to the just claimant, what acts of grace do in a much greater measure, and with very little care, caution, or deliberation.

I suspect that here too, if we contrive to oppose this bill, we shall be found in a struggle against the

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