the due discharge of his functions.  This noble assurance that he is in the path of duty and security, so long as he refrain from the violation of those laws which may have been framed for the good of the community of which he is a member, is the main spring of all industry and improvement.  But this dignified feeling cannot exist in any society which is subject to the arbitrary will of an individual; and although the governor of this colony does not exactly possess the unlimited authority of an eastern despot, since he may be ultimately made accountable to his sovereign and the laws, for the abuse of the power delegated to him, I may be allowed to ask, should he invade the property, and violate the personal liberty of those whom he ought to govern with justice and impartiality, where are the oppressed to seek for retribution?  Is it in this country, situated at sixteen thousand miles from the seat of his injustice and oppression?  To tell a poor man that he may obtain redress in the court of King’s Bench, what is it but a cruel mockery, calculated to render the pang more poignant, which it would pretend to alleviate?

I am not here amusing myself with the supposition of contingencies that may never occur.  I am alluding to outrages that have been actually perpetrated, and of which the bare recital would fill the minds of a British jury with the liveliest sentiments of compassion and sympathy for the oppressed, and of horror and indignation against the oppressor.  Leaseholds cancelled, houses demolished without the smallest compensation, on the plea of public utility, but in reality from motives of private hatred and revenge; freemen imprisoned on arbitrary warrants issued without reference to the magistracy, and even publicly flogged in the same illegal and oppressive manner:  such were the events that crowded the government of a wretch, whom it would be as superfluous to name, as it is needless to hold him up to the execration of posterity* If such an immortality were, as it appears to have been, the object of his pursuit, he has completely attained it.  Almost at his very offset in life, he acquired a notoriety which has increased through all the subsequent sinuosities of his career.  Not content with pushing the discipline of the service to which he belonged, in itself sufficiently severe, to its extreme verge, by an excess of vexatious brutality, he goaded into mutiny a crew of noble-minded fellows, the greater part of whom it has been since discovered, pined away their existence on a desolate island, lost to their country and themselves, the sad victims of an unavailing remorse.  Yet there is one of them still living, who has since fully evinced his devotedness for his country’s glory, and has been deservedly raised to that elevated rank in her service, which but for him many more might have lived to attain.  Despised by his equals in his profession, and detested by his inferiors, he was contradistinguished from other worthy officers of the same name, by prefixing to his that