superintending justice of
the sovereign state has not many striking examples among any people.
Hitherto we have not furnished our contingent to the records of honor.
We have been confounded with the herd of conquerors. Our dominion has
been a vulgar thing. But we begin to emerge; and I hope that a severe
inspection of ourselves, a purification of our own offences, a
lustration of the exorbitances of our own power, is a glory reserved to
this time, to this nation, and to this august tribunal.

The year 1756 is a memorable era in the history of the world: it
introduced a new nation from the remotest verge of the Western world,
with new manners, new customs, new institutions, new opinions, new laws,
into the heart of Asia.

My Lords, if, in that part of Asia whose native regular government was
then broken up,--if, at the moment when it had fallen into darkness and
confusion from having become the prey and almost the sport of the
ambition of its home-born grandees,--if, in that gloomy season, a star
had risen from the West, that would prognosticate a better generation,
and would shed down the sweet influences of order, peace, science, and
security to the natives of that vexed and harassed country, we should
have been covered with genuine honor. It would have been a beautiful and
noble spectacle to mankind.

Indeed, something might have been expected of the kind, when a new
dominion emanated from a learned and enlightened part of the world in
the most enlightened period of its existence. Still more might it have
been expected, when that dominion was found to issue from the bosom of a
free country, that it would have carried with it the full benefit of the
vital principle of the British liberty and Constitution, though its
municipal forms were not communicable, or at least the advantage of the
liberty and spirit of the British Constitution. Had this been the case,
(alas! it was not,) you would have been saved the trouble of this day.
It might have been expected, too, that, in that enlightened state of the
world, influenced by the best religion, and from an improved description
of that best religion, (I mean the Christian reformed religion,) that we
should have done honor to Europe, to letters, to laws, to
religion,--done honor to all the circumstances of which in this island
we boast ourselves, at the great and critical moment of that revolution.

My Lords, it has happened otherwise. It is now left for us to repair our
f