nvenience or evil example_ (which must in their nature be daily
and ordinary incidents) can be admitted as a reason for such mighty
operations. But the true danger is when liberty is nibbled away, for
expedients, and by parts. The _Habeas Corpus_ Act supposes, contrary to
the genius of most other laws, that the lawful magistrate may see
particular men with a malignant eye, and it provides for that identical
case. But when men, in particular descriptions, marked out by the
magistrate himself, are delivered over by Parliament to this possible
malignity, it is not the _Habeas Corpus_ that is occasionally suspended,
but its spirit that is mistaken, and its principle that is subverted.
Indeed, nothing is security to any individual but the common interest of
all.

This act, therefore, has this distinguished evil in it, that it is the
first _partial_ suspension of the _Habeas Corpus_ that has been made.
The precedent, which is always of very great importance, is now
established. For the first time a distinction is made among the people
within this realm. Before this act, every man putting his foot on
English ground, every stranger owing only a local and temporary
allegiance, even negro slaves who had been sold in the colonies and
under an act of Parliament, became as free as every other man who
breathed the same air with them. Now a line is drawn, which may be
advanced further and further at pleasure, on the same argument of mere
expedience on which it was first described. There is no equality among
us; we are not fellow-citizens, if the mariner who lands on the quay
does not rest on as firm legal ground as the merchant who sits in his
counting-house. Other laws may injure the community; this dissolves it.
As things now stand, every man in the West Indies, every one inhabitant
of three unoffending provinces on the continent, every person coming
from the East Indies, every gentleman who has travelled for his health
or education, every mariner who has navigated the seas, is, for no other
offence, under a temporary proscription. Let any of these facts (now
become presumptions of guilt) be proved against him, and the bare
suspicion of the crown puts him out of the law. It is even by no means
clear to me whether the negative proof does not lie upon the person
apprehended on suspicion, to the subversion of all justice.

I have not debated against this bill in its progress through the House;
because it would have been vain to oppose