The end of the law is the redress of wrong, the protection of right, and the preservation of happiness; and the law is so far imperfect as it fails to produce the end for which it is instituted; and where any imperfection is discovered, it is the province of the legislature to supply it.

By the experience, my lords, of one generation after another, by the continued application of successive ages, was our law brought to its present accuracy.  As new combinations of circumstances, or unforeseen artifices of evasion, discovered to our ancestors the insufficiency of former provisions, new expedients were invented; and as wickedness improved its subtilty, the law multiplied its powers and extended its vigilance.

If I should, therefore, allow, what has been urged, that there is no precedent of a bill like this, what can be inferred from it, but that wickedness has found a shelter that was never discovered before, and which must be forced by a new method of attack?  And what then are we required to do more than has been always done by our ancestors, on a thousand occasions of far less importance?

I know not, my lords, whether it be possible to imagine an emergence that can more evidently require the interposition of the legislative power, than this which is now proposed to your consideration.  The nation has been betrayed in peace, and disgraced in war; the constitution has been openly invaded, the votes of the commons set publickly to sale, the treasures of the publick have been squandered to purchase security to those by whom it was oppressed, the people are exasperated to madness, the commons have begun the inquiry that has been for more than twenty years demanded and eluded, and justice is on a sudden insuperably retarded by the deficiency of the law.

Surely, my lords, this is an occasion that may justify the exertion of unusual powers, and yet nothing either new or unusual is required; for the bill now proposed may be supported both by precedents of occasional laws, and parallel statutes of lasting obligation.

When frauds have been committed by the agents of trading companies, bills of indemnity to those by whom any discoveries should be made, have been proposed and passed without any of those dreadful consequences which some noble lords have foreseen in this.  I have never heard that any man was so stupid as to mistake such a bill for a general act of grace, or that the confession of any crimes was procured by it, except of those which it was intended to detect; I have never been informed, that any murderer was blessed with the acuteness of the noble lord, or thought of flying to such an act as to a common shelter for villany.  Such suppositions, my lords, can be intended only to prolong a controversy and weary an opponent; nor can such trifling exaggerations contribute to any other end, than of discovering the fertility of imagination, and the exuberance of eloquence.