iberty to offer his
conjectures; and therefore I shall venture to lay before you what has
arisen in my mind, without pretending to have discovered absolute
certainty, what such accomplished politicians have endeavoured to
conceal.

When I consider, my lords, the tendency of this bill, I find it
calculated only for the propagation of diseases, the suppression of
industry, and the destruction of mankind; I find it the most fatal
engine that ever was pointed at a people, an engine by which those who
are not killed will be disabled, and those who preserve their limbs,
will be deprived of their senses.

This bill, therefore, appears to be designed only to thin the ranks of
mankind, and to disburden the world of the multitudes that inhabit it;
and is, perhaps, the strongest proof of political sagacity that our
new ministers have yet exhibited. They well know, my lords, that they
are universally detested, and that wherever a Briton is destroyed,
they are freed from an enemy; they have, therefore, opened the
floodgates of gin upon the nation, that when it is less numerous, it
may be more easily governed.

Other ministers, my lords, who had not attained to so great a
knowledge in the art of making war upon their country, when they found
their enemies clamorous and bold, used to awe them with prosecutions
and penalties, or destroy them like burglars, with prisons and
gibbets. But every age, my lords, produces some improvement, and every
nation, however degenerate, gives birth at some happy period of time
to men of great and enterprising genius. It is our fortune to be
witnesses of a new discovery in politicks; we may congratulate
ourselves upon being contemporaries with those men who have shown that
hangmen and halters are unnecessary in a state, and that ministers may
escape the reproach of destroying their enemies, by inciting them to
destroy themselves.

This new method may, indeed, have upon different constitutions a
different operation; it may destroy the lives of some, and the senses
of others; but either of these effects will answer the purposes of the
ministry, to whom it is indifferent, provided the nation becomes
insensible, whether pestilence or lunacy prevails among them. Either
mad or dead, the greatest part of the people must quickly be, or there
is no hope of the continuance of the present ministry.

For this purpose, my lords, what could have been invented more
efficacious than an establishment of a certain