They even ask the country gentlemen
To join them in this job. But, God be praised,
Those gentlemen are sound, and of repute;
Their names, their attainments, and their blood,
[Ironical Opposition cheers.]
Safeguard them from an onslaught on an Act
For ends so sinister and palpable! [Cheers and jeerings.]

FULLER

I disapprove of censures of the Act.--
All who would entertain such hostile thought
Would swear that black is white, that night is day.
No honest man will join a reckless crew
Who'd overthrow their country for their gain! [Laughter.]

TIERNEY

It is incumbent on me to declare
In the last speaker's face my censure, based
On grounds most clear and constitutional.--
An Act it is that studies to create
A standing army, large and permanent;
Which kind of force has ever been beheld
With jealous-eyed disfavour in this House.
It makes for sure oppression, binding men
To serve for less than service proves it worth
Conditioned by no hampering penalty.
For these and late-spoke reasons, then, I say,
Let not the Act deface the statute-book,
But blot it out forthwith. [Hear, hear.]

FOX [rising amid cheers]

At this late hour,
After the riddling fire the Act has drawn on't,
My words shall hold the House the briefest while.
Too obvious to the most unwilling mind
It grows that the existence of this law
Experience and reflection have condemned.
Professing to do much, it makes for nothing;
Not only so; while feeble in effect
It shows it vicious in its principle.
Engaging to raise men for the common weal
It sets a harmful and unequal tax
Capriciously on our communities.--
The annals of a century fail to show
More flagrant cases of oppressiveness
Than those this statute works to perpetrate,
Which [like all Bills this favoured statesman frames,
And clothes with tapestries of rhetoric
Disguising their real web of commonplace]
Though held as shaped for English bulwarking,
Breathes in its heart perversities of party,
And instincts toward oligarchic power,
Galling the many to relieve the few! [Cheers.]

Whatever breadth and sense of equity
Inform the methods of this minister,
Those mitigants nearly always trace their root
To measures that his predecessors wrought.
And ere his Government can dare assert
Superior claim to England's confidence,
They owe