instantly become his own.  Instead of a public officer in an abusive department, whose province is an object to be regulated, he becomes a criminal who is to be punished.  I do most seriously put it to administration to consider the wisdom of a timely reform.  Early reformations are amicable arrangements with a friend in power; late reformations are terms imposed upon a conquered enemy:  early reformations are made in cool blood; late reformations are made under a state of inflammation.  In that state of things the people behold in government nothing that is respectable.  They see the abuse, and they will see nothing else.  They fall into the temper of a furious populace provoked at the disorder of a house of ill-fame; they never attempt to correct or regulate; they go to work by the shortest way:  they abate the nuisance, they pull down the house.

This is my opinion with regard to the true interest of government.  But as it is the interest of government that reformation should be early, it is the interest of the people that it should be temperate.  It is their interest, because a temperate reform is permanent, and because it has a principle of growth.  Whenever we improve, it is right to leave room for a further improvement.  It is right to consider, to look about us, to examine the effect of what we have done.  Then we can proceed with confidence, because we can proceed with intelligence.  Whereas in hot reformations, in what men more zealous than considerate call making clear work, the whole is generally so crude, so harsh, so indigested, mixed with so much imprudence and so much injustice, so contrary to the whole course of human nature and human institutions, that the very people who are most eager for it are among the first to grow disgusted at what they have done.  Then some part of the abdicated grievance is recalled from its exile in order to become a corrective of the correction.  Then the abuse assumes all the credit and popularity of a reform.  The very idea of purity and disinterestedness in politics falls into disrepute, and is considered as a vision of hot and inexperienced men; and thus disorders become incurable, not by the virulence of their own quality, but by the unapt and violent nature of the remedies.  A great part, therefore, of my idea of reform is meant to operate gradually:  some benefits will come at a nearer, some at a more remote period.  We must no more make haste to be rich by parsimony than by intemperate acquisition.

In my opinion, it is our duty, when we have the desires of the people before us, to pursue them, not in the spirit of literal obedience, which may militate with their very principle,—­much less to treat them with a peevish and contentious litigation, as if we were adverse parties in a suit.  It would, Sir, be most dishonorable for a faithful representative of the Commons to take advantage of any inartificial expression of the people’s wishes, in order to frustrate their attainment of what they have an