If men were all honest and wise, laws of all kinds would be superfluous, a legislature would become useless, and our authority must cease for want of objects to employ it; but we find, my lords, that there are men whom nothing but laws and penalties can make supportable to society; that there are men, who, if they are not told their duty, will never know it, and who will, at last, only perform what they shall be punished for neglecting.

Were all men, like the noble lord whom I am now attempting to answer, vigilant to discover, sagacious to distinguish, and industrious to prosecute the interest of the publick, I should be very far from proposing that they should be constrained by rules, or required to follow any guide but their own reason; I should resign my own prosperity, and that of my country, implicitly into their hands, and rest in full security that nothing would be omitted that human wisdom could dictate for our advantage.

I am not persuading your lordships to lay restraints upon virtue and prudence, but to consider how seldom virtue and authority are found together, how often prudence degenerates into selfishness, and all generous regard for the publick is contracted into narrow views of private interest.  I am endeavouring to show, that since laws must be equally obligatory to all, it is the interest of the few good men to submit to restraints, which, though they may sometimes obstruct the influence of their virtue, will abundantly recompense them, by securing them from the mischiefs that wickedness, reigning almost without limits, and operating without opposition, might bring upon them.

It may not be improper to add, my lords, that no degree of human wisdom is exempt from errour; that he who claims the privilege of acting at discretion, subjects himself likewise to the necessity of answering for the consequences of his conduct, and that ill success will at least subject him to reproach and suspicion, from which, he whose conduct is regulated by established rules, may always have an opportunity of setting himself free.

Fixed and certain regulations are, therefore, my lords, useful to the wisest and best men; and to those whose abilities are less conspicuous, and whose integrity is at best doubtful, I suppose it will not be doubted that they are indispensably necessary.

Some of the expedients mentioned in this bill, I shall readily concur with the noble lord in censuring and rejecting; I am very far from thinking it expedient to invest the governours of our colonies with any new degree of power, or to subject the captains of our ships of war to their command.  I have lived, my lords, to see many successions of those petty monarchs, and have known few whom I would willingly trust with the exercise of great authority.  It is not uncommon, my lords, for those to be made cruel and capricious by power, who were moderate and prudent in lower stations; and if the effects of exaltation are to be feared even in good men, what may not be expected from it in those, whom nothing but a distant employment could secure from the laws, and who, if they had not been sent to America to govern, must probably have gone thither on a different occasion?