the measure to
be taken in your sentence upon the delinquent now before you. Your
sentence, I say, will be measured according to that rule which ought to
direct the judgment of all courts in like cases, lessening it for a
lesser offence, and aggravating it for a greater, until the measure of
justice is completely full.

* * * * *

My Lords, I have done; the part of the Commons is concluded. With a
trembling solicitude we consign this product of our long, long labors to
your charge. Take it!--take it! It is a sacred trust. Never before was a
cause of such magnitude submitted to any human tribunal.

My Lords, at this awful close, in the name of the Commons, and
surrounded by them, I attest the retiring, I attest the advancing
generations, between which, as a link in the great chain of eternal
order, we stand. We call this nation, we call the world to witness, that
the Commons have shrunk from no labor, that we have been guilty of no
prevarication, that we have made no compromise with crime, that we have
not feared any odium whatsoever, in the long warfare which we have
carried on with the crimes, with the vices, with the exorbitant wealth,
with the enormous and overpowering influence of Eastern corruption. This
war, my Lords, we have waged for twenty-two years, and the conflict has
been fought at your Lordships' bar for the last seven years. My Lords,
twenty-two years is a great space in the scale of the life of man; it is
no inconsiderable space in the history of a great nation. A business
which has so long occupied the councils and the tribunals of Great
Britain cannot possibly be huddled over in the course of vulgar, trite,
and transitory events. Nothing but some of those great revolutions that
break the traditionary chain of human memory, and alter the very face of
Nature itself, can possibly obscure it. My Lords, we are all elevated to
a degree of importance by it; the meanest of us will, by means of it,
more or less become the concern of posterity,--if we are yet to hope for
such a thing, in the present state of the world, as a recording,
retrospective, civilized posterity: but this is in the hands of the
great Disposer of events; it is not ours to settle how it shall be.

My Lords, your House yet stands,--it stands as a great edifice; but let
me say, that it stands in the midst of ruins,--in the midst of the ruins
that have been made by the greatest moral earthquake that ever conv