uently a system of fraud.

You now see some of the means by which fortunes have been made by
certain persons in India; you see the confederacies they have formed
with one another for their mutual concealment and mutual support; you
will see how they reply to their own deceitful inquiries by fraudulent
answers; you will see that Cheltenham calls upon Calcutta, as one deep
calls upon another, and that the call which is made for explanation is
answered in mystery; in short, you will see the very constitution of
their minds here developed.

And now, my Lords, in what a situation are we all placed! This
prosecution of the Commons, I wish to have it understood, and I am sure
I shall not be disclaimed in it, is a prosecution not only for the
punishing a delinquent, a prosecution not merely for preventing this and
that offence, but it is a great censorial prosecution, for the purpose
of preserving the manners, characters, and virtues that characterize the
people of England. The situation in which we stand is dreadful. These
people pour in upon us every day. They not only bring with them the
wealth which they have acquired, but they bring with them into our
country the vices by which it was acquired. Formerly the people of
England were censured, and perhaps properly, with being a sullen,
unsocial, cold, unpleasant race of men, and as inconstant as the climate
in which they are born. These are the vices which the enemies of the
kingdom charged them with: and people are seldom charged with vices of
which they do not in some measure partake. But nobody refused them the
character of being an open-hearted, candid, liberal, plain, sincere
people,--qualities which would cancel a thousand faults, if they had
them. But if, by conniving at these frauds, you once teach the people of
England a concealing, narrow, suspicious, guarded conduct,--if you teach
them qualities directly the contrary to those by which they have
hitherto been distinguished,--if you make them a nation of concealers, a
nation of dissemblers, a nation of liars, a nation of forgers,--my
Lords, if you, in one word, turn them into a people of _banians_, the
character of England, that character which, more than our arms, and more
than our commerce, has made us a great nation, the character of England
will be gone and lost.

Our liberty is as much in danger as our honor and our national
character. We, who here appear representing the Commons of England, are
not wild enoug