or evil example (which must in their nature be daily and ordinary incidents) can be admitted as a reason for such mighty operations.  But the true danger is when liberty is nibbled away, for expedients, and by parts.  The Habeas Corpus Act supposes, contrary to the genius of most other laws, that the lawful magistrate may see particular men with a malignant eye, and it provides for that identical case.  But when men, in particular descriptions, marked out by the magistrate himself, are delivered over by Parliament to this possible malignity, it is not the Habeas Corpus that is occasionally suspended, but its spirit that is mistaken, and its principle that is subverted.  Indeed, nothing is security to any individual but the common interest of all.

This act, therefore, has this distinguished evil in it, that it is the first partial suspension of the Habeas Corpus that has been made.  The precedent, which is always of very great importance, is now established.  For the first time a distinction is made among the people within this realm.  Before this act, every man putting his foot on English ground, every stranger owing only a local and temporary allegiance, even negro slaves who had been sold in the colonies and under an act of Parliament, became as free as every other man who breathed the same air with them.  Now a line is drawn, which may be advanced further and further at pleasure, on the same argument of mere expedience on which it was first described.  There is no equality among us; we are not fellow-citizens, if the mariner who lands on the quay does not rest on as firm legal ground as the merchant who sits in his counting-house.  Other laws may injure the community; this dissolves it.  As things now stand, every man in the West Indies, every one inhabitant of three unoffending provinces on the continent, every person coming from the East Indies, every gentleman who has travelled for his health or education, every mariner who has navigated the seas, is, for no other offence, under a temporary proscription.  Let any of these facts (now become presumptions of guilt) be proved against him, and the bare suspicion of the crown puts him out of the law.  It is even by no means clear to me whether the negative proof does not lie upon the person apprehended on suspicion, to the subversion of all justice.

I have not debated against this bill in its progress through the House; because it would have been vain to oppose, and impossible to correct it.  It is some time since I have been clearly convinced, that, in the present state of things, all opposition to any measures proposed by ministers, where the name of America appears, is vain and frivolous.  You may be sure that I do not speak of my opposition, which in all circumstances must be so, but that of men of the greatest wisdom and authority in the nation.  Everything proposed against America is supposed of course to be in favor of Great Britain.  Good and