which are both natural and decent, when questions
are dubious, when probability seems to be almost equally divided, when
truth appears to hover between two parties, and by turns to favour
every speaker; when specious arguments are urged on both sides, and
the number of circumstances to be collected, and of relations to be
adjusted, is so great, that an exact and indubitable decision is
scarcely to be attained by human reason. I do not, my lords, now speak
with the diffidence of inquiry, or the uncertainty of conjecture, nor
imagine that I am now examining a political expedient, of which the
success can only be perfectly known by experience, and of which,
therefore, no man can absolutely determine, whether it will be useful
or pernicious, or a metaphysical difficulty, which may be discussed
for ever without being decided.

In considering this bill, my lords, I proceed upon stated and
invariable principles. I have no facts to examine but such as, to the
last degree, are notorious, such as have been experienced every hour,
since the existence of society; and shall appeal, not to transitory
opinions, or casual assertions, but to the laws of all civilized
nations, and to the determinations of every man whose wisdom or virtue
have given him a claim to regard.

All the decrees of all the legislators of the earth, or the
declarations of wise men, all the observations which nature furnishes,
and all the examples which history affords, concur in condemning this
bill before us, as a bill injurious to society, destructive of private
virtue, and, by consequence, of publick happiness, detrimental to the
human species, and, therefore, such as ought to be rejected in that
assembly to which the care of the nation is committed; that assembly
which ought to meet only for the benefit of mankind, and of which the
resolutions ought to have no other end, than the suppression of those
vices by which the happiness of life is obstructed or impaired.

The bill now before you, my lords, is fundamentally wrong, as it is
formed upon a hateful project of increasing the consumption of
spirituous liquors, and, consequently, of promoting drunkenness among
a people reproached already for it throughout the whole world. It
contains such a concatenation of enormities, teems with so vast a
number of mischiefs, and therefore produces, in those minds that
attend to its nature, and pursue its consequences, such endless
variety of arguments against it, that