your penal code, that more must be poured forth to ascend to Heaven and testify against you?  How will you carry the bill into effect?  Can you commit a whole county to their own prisons?  Will you erect a gibbet in every field, and hang up men like scarecrows? or will you proceed (as you must to bring this measure into effect) by decimation? place the county under martial law? depopulate and lay waste all around you? and restore Sherwood Forest as an acceptable gift to the crown, in its former condition of a royal chase and an asylum for outlaws?  Are these the remedies for a starving and desperate populace?  Will the famished wretch who has braved your bayonets be appalled by your gibbets?  When death is a relief, and the only relief it appears that you will afford him, will he be dragooned into tranquillity?  Will that which could not be effected by your grenadiers, be accomplished by your executioners?  If you proceed by the forms of law, where is your evidence?  Those who have refused to impeach their accomplices, when transportation only was the punishment, will hardly be tempted to witness against them when death is the penalty.  With all due deference to the noble lords opposite, I think a little investigation, some previous enquiry would induce even them to change their purpose.  That most favourite state measure, so marvellously efficacious in many and recent instances, temporising, would not be without its advantages in this.  When a proposal is made to emancipate or relieve, you hesitate, you deliberate for years, you temporise and tamper with the minds of men; but a death-bill must be passed off hand, without a thought of the consequences.  Sure I am, from what I have heard, and from what I have seen, that to pass the hill under all the existing circumstances, without enquiry, without deliberation, would only be to add injustice to irritation, and barbarity to neglect.  The framers of such a bill must be content to inherit the honours of that Athenian lawgiver whose edicts were said to be written not in ink but in blood.  But suppose it past; suppose one of these men, as I have seen them,—­meagre with famine, sullen with despair, careless of a life which your Lordships are perhaps about to value at something less than the price of a stocking-frame;—­suppose this man surrounded by the children for whom he is unable to procure bread at the hazard of his existence, about to be torn for ever from a family which he lately supported in peaceful industry, and which it is not his fault that he can no longer so support;—­suppose this man, and there are ten thousand such from whom you may select your victims, dragged into court, to be tried for this new offence, by this new law; still, there are two things wanting to convict and condemn him; and these are, in my opinion,—­twelve butchers for a jury, and a Jefferies for a judge!

DEBATE ON THE EARL OF DONOUGHMORE’S MOTION FOR A COMMITTEE ON THE ROMAN CATHOLIC CLAIMS, APRIL 21. 1812.