The following extracts comprise, I think, the passages of most spirit:—­

“When we are told that these men are leagued together, not only for the destruction of their own comfort, but of their very means of subsistence, can we forget that it is the bitter policy, the destructive warfare, of the last eighteen years which has destroyed their comfort, your comfort, all men’s comfort;—­that policy which, originating with ‘great statesmen now no more,’ has survived the dead to become a curse on the living, unto the third and fourth generation!  These men never destroyed their looms till they were become useless,—­worse than useless; till they were become actual impediments to their exertions in obtaining their daily bread.  Can you then wonder that, in times like these, when bankruptcy, convicted fraud, and imputed felony, are found in a station not far beneath that of your Lordships, the lowest, though once most useful, portion of the people should forget their duty in their distresses, and become only less guilty than one of their representatives?  But while the exalted offender can find means to baffle the law, new capital punishments must be devised, new snares of death must be spread for the wretched mechanic who is famished into guilt.  These men were willing to dig, but the spade was in other hands:  they were not ashamed to beg, but there was none to relieve them.  Their own means of subsistence were cut off; all other employments pre-occupied; and their excesses, however to be deplored or condemned, can hardly be the subject of surprise.

“I have traversed the seat of war in the Peninsula I have been in some of the most oppressed provinces of Turkey; but never, under the most despotic of infidel governments, did I behold such squalid wretchedness as I have seen since my return, in the very heart of a Christian country.  And what are your remedies?  After months of inaction, and months of action worse than inactivity, at length comes forth the grand specific, the never-failing nostrum of all state physicians from the days of Draco to the present time.  After feeling the pulse, and shaking the head over the patient, prescribing the usual course of warm water and bleeding—­the warm water of your mawkish police, and the lancets of your military—­these convulsions must terminate in death, the sure consummation of the prescriptions of all political Sangrados.  Setting aside the palpable injustice and the certain inefficiency of the bill, are there not capital punishments sufficient on your statutes?  Is there not blood enough upon your penal code, that more must be poured forth to ascend to heaven and testify against you?  How will you carry this 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 scare-crows? or will you proceed (as you must, to bring this measure into effect,) by decimation; place the country under martial law; depopulate and