ll and rejecting it, we
should labour with unanimous endeavours, and incessant assiduity, to
supply its defects, and correct its improprieties; to show that a design
so beneficial can never be proposed to us without effect, and that
whenever we find honest zeal, we shall be ready to assist it with
judgment and experience.

Compassion might likewise concur to invigorate our endeavours on this
occasion. For who, my lords, can reflect on families one day flourishing
in affluence, and contributing to the general prosperity of their
country, and on a sudden, without the crime of extravagance or
negligence, reduced to penury and distress, harassed by creditors, and
plundered by the vultures of the law, without wishing that such
misfortunes might by some expedient be averted? But this, my lords, is
not the only nor the greatest calamity, which this bill is intended to
prevent. The loss of wealth, however grievous, is yet less to be dreaded
than that of liberty, and indigence added to captivity is the highest
degree of human misery. Yet even this, however dreadful, is now the lot
of multitudes of our fellow-subjects, who are languishing with want in
the prisons of Spain.

Surely, my lords, every proposal must be well received that intends the
prevention or relief of calamities like these. Surely the ruin of its
merchants must alarm every trading nation, nor can a British senate sit
unconcerned at the captivity of those men by whom liberty is chiefly
supported.

Of the importance of the merchants, by whom this bill is recommended to
our consideration, and by whose influence it has already passed the
other house, it is not necessary to remind your lordships, who know,
that to this class of men our nation is indebted for all the advantages
that it possesses above those which we behold with compassion or
contempt, for its wealth and power, and perhaps for its liberty and
civility. To the merchants, my lords, we owe that our name is known
beyond our own coasts, and that our influence is not confined to the
narrow limits of a single island.

Let us not, therefore, my lords, reject with contempt what is proposed
and solicited by men of this class; men whose experience and knowledge
cannot but have enabled them to offer something useful and important,
though, perhaps, for want of acquaintance with former laws, they may
have imagined those provisions now first suggested, which have only been
forgotten, and petitioned for the enacti