that he has, for that purpose, not only taken the opportunity of his own
power, but made whole establishments, altered and perverted others, and
created complete revolutions in the country's government, for the
purpose of making the power which ought to be subservient to legal
government subservient to corruption; that, when he could no longer
cover these fraudulent proceedings by artifice, he endeavored to justify
them by principle. These artifices we mean to detect; these principles
we mean to attack, and, with your Lordships' aid, to demolish, destroy,
and subvert forever.

My Lords, I must say, that in this business, which is a matter of
collusion, concealment, and deceit, your Lordships will, perhaps, not
feel the same degree of interest as in the others. Hitherto you have had
before you crimes of dignity: you have had before you the ruin and
expulsion of great and illustrious families, the breach of solemn public
treaties, the merciless pillage and total subversion of the first houses
in Asia. But the crimes which are the most striking to the imagination
are not always the most pernicious in their effects: in these high,
eminent acts of domineering tyranny, their very magnitude proves a sort
of corrective to their virulence. The occasions on which they can be
exercised are rare; the persons upon whom they can be exercised few; the
persons who can exercise them, in the nature of things, are not many.
These high tragic acts of superior, overbearing tyranny are privileged
crimes; they are the unhappy, dreadful prerogative, they are the
distinguished and incommunicable attributes, of superior wickedness in
eminent station.

But, my Lords, when the vices of low, sordid, and illiberal minds infect
that high situation,--when theft, bribery, and peculation, attended with
fraud, prevarication, falsehood, misrepresentation, and forgery--when
all these follow in one train,--when these vices, which gender and spawn
in dirt, and are nursed in dunghills, come and pollute with their slime
that throne which ought to be a seat of dignity and purity, the evil is
much greater; it may operate daily and hourly; it is not only imitable,
but improvable, and it will be imitated, and will be improved, from the
highest to the lowest, through all the gradations of a corrupt
government. They are reptile vices. There are situations in which the
acts of the individual are of some moment, the example comparatively of
little importance. In the