The bill now under our consideration, my lords, cannot be rejected without danger of exasperating the nation, without affording to the discontented and malevolent an opportunity of representing this house as regardless of the publick miseries, and deaf to the cries of our fellow-subjects languishing in captivity, and mourning in poverty.  The melancholy and dejected will naturally conceive us inebriated with affluence, and elated with dignity, endeavouring to remove from our eyes every spectacle of misery, and to turn aside from those lamentations which may interrupt the enjoyment of our felicity.

Nor, indeed, can it be justly said, that such representations are without grounds, when we consider the important occasion on which this bill is drawn up, the bitterness of those calamities which it is intended to redress, and the authority by which it is recommended to us.

It may naturally be expected, my lords, that the title of a bill for the protection and security of trade, should raise an uncommon degree of ardour and attention; it might be conceived that every lord in this house would be ambitious of signalizing his zeal for the interest of his country, by proposing, on this occasion, every expedient which experience or information had suggested to him; and that instead of setting ourselves free from the labour of inquiry and the anxiety of deliberation, by raising objections to the bill and rejecting it, we should labour with unanimous endeavours, and incessant assiduity, to supply its defects, and correct its improprieties; to show that a design so beneficial can never be proposed to us without effect, and that whenever we find honest zeal, we shall be ready to assist it with judgment and experience.

Compassion might likewise concur to invigorate our endeavours on this occasion.  For who, my lords, can reflect on families one day flourishing in affluence, and contributing to the general prosperity of their country, and on a sudden, without the crime of extravagance or negligence, reduced to penury and distress, harassed by creditors, and plundered by the vultures of the law, without wishing that such misfortunes might by some expedient be averted?  But this, my lords, is not the only nor the greatest calamity, which this bill is intended to prevent.  The loss of wealth, however grievous, is yet less to be dreaded than that of liberty, and indigence added to captivity is the highest degree of human misery.  Yet even this, however dreadful, is now the lot of multitudes of our fellow-subjects, who are languishing with want in the prisons of Spain.

Surely, my lords, every proposal must be well received that intends the prevention or relief of calamities like these.  Surely the ruin of its merchants must alarm every trading nation, nor can a British senate sit unconcerned at the captivity of those men by whom liberty is chiefly supported.