There is at least one part of the nation yet untainted, a part which deserves the utmost care of the legislature, and which must be endangered by a law like this before us.  The children, my lords, to whom the affairs of the present generation must be transferred, and by whom the nation must be continued, are surely no ignoble part of the publick.  They are yet innocent, and it is our province to take care that they may in time be virtuous; we ought, therefore, to remove from before them those examples that may infect, and those temptations that may corrupt them.  We ought to reform their parents, lest they should imitate them; and to destroy those provocatives to vice, by which the present generation has been intoxicated, lest they should with equal force operate upon the next.

There is, therefore, no occasion, my lords, for any farther deliberation upon this bill; which, if the nation be yet in any part untainted, will infect it; and if it be universally corrupted, will have no tendency to amend it; and which we ought, for these reasons to reject, that our abhorrence of vice may be publickly known, and that no part of the calamities which wickedness must produce, may be imputed to us.

Lord DELAWARE then spoke to the following effect:—­My lords, as I am entirely of opinion that a more accurate examination of this bill will evince its usefulness and propriety to many of the lords who are now most ardent in opposing it, I cannot but think it necessary to consider it in a committee.

It is to be remembered, my lords, that this bill is intended for two purposes of very great importance to the publick; it is designed that the liberties of mankind shall be secured by the same provisions by which the vices of our own people are to be reclaimed, and supplies for carrying on the war shall be raised by a reformation of the manners of the people.

This, my lords, is surely a great and generous design; this is a complication of publick benefits, worthy the most exalted virtue, and the most refined policy; and though a bill in which views so distant are to be reconciled, should appear not to be absolutely perfect, it must yet be allowed to deserve regard; nor ought we to reject, without very cautious deliberation, any probable method of reforming the nation, or any easy way of raising supplies.

The encroachment of usurpation without, and the prevalence of vice within, is a conjunction of circumstances very dangerous; and to remove both by the same means, is an undertaking that surely cannot deserve either censure or contempt:  if it succeeds, it may demand the loudest acclamations; and if it fails, must be at least approved.

The use, my lords, of spirituous liquors, though in the excess now so frequently to be observed, undoubtedly detrimental to multitudes, is not, in a proper degree, either criminal or unwholesome; and, therefore, ought not to be prohibited by a tax so heavy as has been proposed by a noble lord, who, if he pursues his reasoning, must propose to tax in the same proportion every other liquor that can administer to vice.