ay begin
censors, and be obliged to end accomplices. They may be even put under
the direction of those whom they were appointed to punish.

The fourth and last objection is, that the bill will hurt public credit.
I do not know whether this requires an answer. But if it does, look to
your foundations. The sinking fund is the pillar of credit in this
country; and let it not be forgot, that the distresses, owing to the
mismanagement, of the East India Company, have already taken a million
from that fund by the non-payment of duties. The bills drawn upon the
Company, which are about four millions, cannot be accepted without the
consent of the Treasury. The Treasury, acting under a Parliamentary
trust and authority, pledges the public for these millions. If they
pledge the public, the public must have a security in its hands for the
management of this interest, or the national credit is gone. For
otherwise it is not only the East India Company, which is a great
interest, that is undone, but, clinging to the security of all your
funds, it drags down the rest, and the whole fabric perishes in one
ruin. If this bill does not provide a direction of integrity and of
ability competent to that trust, the objection is fatal; if it does,
public credit must depend on the support of the bill.

It has been said, If you violate this charter, what security has the
charter of the Bank, in which public credit is so deeply concerned, and
even the charter of London, in which the rights of so many subjects are
involved? I answer, In the like case they have no security at all,--no,
no security at all. If the Bank should, by every species of
mismanagement, fall into a state similar to that of the East India
Company,--if it should be oppressed with demands it could not answer,
engagements which it could not perform, and with bills for which it
could not procure payment,--no charter should protect the mismanagement
from correction, and such public grievances from redress. If the city
of London had the means and will of destroying an empire, and of cruelly
oppressing and tyrannizing over millions of men as good as themselves,
the charter of the city of London should prove no sanction to such
tyranny and such oppression. Charters are kept, when their purposes are
maintained: they are violated, when the privilege is supported against
its end and its object.

Now, Sir, I have finished all I proposed to say, as my reasons for
giving my vote to this