k to lay before their
audience such reasons as, though they have been easily confuted by the
penetration and experience of your lordships, may, to men unacquainted
with politicks, and remote from the sources of intelligence, appear
very formidable.

It is, therefore, not sufficient that your lordships have rejected the
former motion, and shown that you do not absolutely disapprove the
measures of the government, since it may be asserted, and with some
appearance of reason, that barely not to admit a motion by which all
the measures of the last year would have been at once over-turned and
annihilated, is no proof that they have been fully justified, and
warmly confirmed, since many of the transactions might have been at
least doubtful, and yet this motion not have been proper.

In an affair of so great importance, my lords, an affair in which the
interest of all the western world is engaged, it is necessary to take
away all suspicions, when the nation is about to be involved in a war
for the security of ourselves and our posterity; in a war which,
however prosperous, must be at least expensive, and which is to be
carried on against an enemy who, though not invincible, is, in a very
high degree, powerful. It is surely proper to show, in the most
publick manner, our conviction, that neither prudence nor frugality
has been wanting; that the inconveniencies which will be always felt
in such contentions, are not brought upon us by wantonness or
negligence; and that no care is omitted by which they are alleviated,
and that they may be borne more patiently, because they cannot be
avoided.

This attestation, my lords, we can only give by a solemn address to
his majesty of a tendency contrary to that of the motion now rejected;
and by such an attestation only can we hope to revive the courage of
the nation, to unite those in the common cause of liberty whom false
reports have alienated or shaken, and to restore to his majesty that
confidence which all the subtilties of faction have been employed to
impair. I, therefore, move, that an humble address be presented to his
majesty, importing, "That in the unsettled and dangerous situation of
affairs in Europe, the sending a considerable body of British forces
into the Austrian Netherlands, and augmenting the same with sixteen
thousand of his majesty's electoral troops, and the Hessians in the
British pay, and thereby, in conjunction with the queen of Hungary's
troops in the Low Co