millions, cannot be accepted without the consent of the Treasury.  The Treasury, acting under a Parliamentary trust and authority, pledges the public for these millions.  If they pledge the public, the public must have a security in its hands for the management of this interest, or the national credit is gone.  For otherwise it is not only the East India Company, which is a great interest, that is undone, but, clinging to the security of all your funds, it drags down the rest, and the whole fabric perishes in one ruin.  If this bill does not provide a direction of integrity and of ability competent to that trust, the objection is fatal; if it does, public credit must depend on the support of the bill.

It has been said, If you violate this charter, what security has the charter of the Bank, in which public credit is so deeply concerned, and even the charter of London, in which the rights of so many subjects are involved?  I answer, In the like case they have no security at all,—­no, no security at all.  If the Bank should, by every species of mismanagement, fall into a state similar to that of the East India Company,—­if it should be oppressed with demands it could not answer, engagements which it could not perform, and with bills for which it could not procure payment,—­no charter should protect the mismanagement from correction, and such public grievances from redress.  If the city of London had the means and will of destroying an empire, and of cruelly oppressing and tyrannizing over millions of men as good as themselves, the charter of the city of London should prove no sanction to such tyranny and such oppression.  Charters are kept, when their purposes are maintained:  they are violated, when the privilege is supported against its end and its object.

Now, Sir, I have finished all I proposed to say, as my reasons for giving my vote to this bill.  If I am wrong, it is not for want of pains to know what is right.  This pledge, at least, of my rectitude I have given to my country.

And now, having done my duty to the bill, let me say a word to the author.  I should leave him to his own noble sentiments, if the unworthy and illiberal language with which he has been treated, beyond all example of Parliamentary liberty, did not make a few words necessary,—­not so much in justice to him as to my own feelings.  I must say, then, that it will be a distinction honorable to the age, that the rescue of the greatest number of the human race that ever were so grievously oppressed from the greatest tyranny that was ever exercised has fallen to the lot of abilities and dispositions equal to the task,—­that it has fallen to one who has the enlargement to comprehend, the spirit to undertake, and the eloquence to support so great a measure of hazardous benevolence.  His spirit is not owing to his ignorance of the state of men and things:  he well knows what snares are spread about his path, from personal animosity, from court intrigues, and