Much less is this to be suffered in the presence of our cooerdinate
branch of legislature, and as it were with your and our own tacit
acquiescence. Whenever the public mind is misled, it becomes the duty of
the Commons of Great Britain to give it a more proper tone and a juster
way of thinking. When ignorance and corruption have usurped the
professor's chair, and placed themselves in the seats of science and of
virtue, it is high time for us to speak out. We know that the doctrines
of folly are of great use to the professors of vice. We know that it is
one of the signs of a corrupt and degenerate age, and one of the means
of insuring its further corruption and degeneracy, to give mild and
lenient epithets to vices and to crimes. The world is much influenced by
names. And as terms are the representatives of sentiments, when persons
who exercise any censorial magistracy seem in their language to
compromise with crimes and criminals by expressing no horror of the one
or detestation of the other, the world will naturally think that they
act merely to acquit themselves in its sight in form, but in reality to
evade their duty. Yes, my Lords, the world must think that such persons
palter with their sacred trust, and are tender to crimes because they
look forward to the future possession of the same power which they now
prosecute, and purpose to abuse it in the manner it has been abused by
the criminal of whom they are so tender.
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