If money, therefore, cannot be raised but by this bill, if the expenses of the government cannot be defrayed but by corrupting the morals of the people, I shall without scruple declare, that money ought not to be raised, nor the designs of the government supported, because the people can suffer nothing from the failure of publick measures, or even from the dissolution of the government itself, which will be equally to be dreaded or avoided with an universal depravity of morals, and a general decay of corporeal vigour.  Even the insolence of a foreign conqueror can inflict nothing more severe than the diseases which debauchery produces; nor can any thing be feared from the disorders of anarchy more dangerous or more calamitous, than the madness of sedition, or the miseries which must ensue to each individual from universal wickedness.

Such, my lords, is the expedient by which we are now about to raise the supplies for the present year; and such is the new method of taxation which the sagacity of our ministers has luckily discovered.  A foreign war is to be supported by the destruction of our people at home, and the revenue of the government to be improved by the decay of our manufactures.  We are to owe henceforward our power to epidemical diseases, our wealth to the declension of our commerce, and our security to riot and to tumult.

There is yet another consideration, my lords, which ought well to be regarded, before we suffer this bill to pass.  Many laws are merely experimental, and have been made, not because the legislature thought them indisputably proper, but because no better could at that time be struck out, and because the arguments in their favour appeared stronger than those against them, or because the questions to which they related were so dark and intricate that nothing was to be determined with certainty, and no other method could therefore be followed, but that of making the first attempts at hazard, and correcting these errours, or supplying these defects which might hereafter be discovered by those lights which time should afford.

Though I am far from thinking, my lords, that the question relating to the effects of this law is either doubtful or obscure; though I am certain that the means of reforming the vice which its advocates pretend it is designed to prevent, are obvious and easy; yet I should have hoped, that the projectors of such a scheme would have allowed at least the uncertainty of the salutary effects expected from it, and would, therefore, have made some provision for the repeal of it when it should be found to fail.

But, my lords, our ministers appear to have thought it sufficient to endear them to their country, and immortalize their names, that they have invented a new method of raising money, and seem to have very little regard to any part of the art of government; they will, at least in their own opinion, have deserved applause, if they leave the publick revenue greater, by whatever diminution of the publick virtue.