to prove both the principal facts and the aggravatory ones by evidence, and to show their nature and quality by the rules of law, morality, and policy, then this criminal, then his counsel, then his accomplices and hirelings, posted in newspapers and dispersed in circles through every part of the kingdom, represent him as an object of great compassion, because he is treated, say they, with, nothing but opprobrious names and scurrilous invectives.

To all this the Managers of the Commons will say nothing by way of defence:  it would be to betray their trust, if they did.  No, my Lords, they have another and a very different duty to perform on this occasion.  They are bound not to suffer public opinion, which often prevents judgment and often defeats its effects, to be debauched and corrupted.  Much less is this to be suffered in the presence of our cooerdinate branch of legislature, and as it were with your and our own tacit acquiescence.  Whenever the public mind is misled, it becomes the duty of the Commons of Great Britain to give it a more proper tone and a juster way of thinking.  When ignorance and corruption have usurped the professor’s chair, and placed themselves in the seats of science and of virtue, it is high time for us to speak out.  We know that the doctrines of folly are of great use to the professors of vice.  We know that it is one of the signs of a corrupt and degenerate age, and one of the means of insuring its further corruption and degeneracy, to give mild and lenient epithets to vices and to crimes.  The world is much influenced by names.  And as terms are the representatives of sentiments, when persons who exercise any censorial magistracy seem in their language to compromise with crimes and criminals by expressing no horror of the one or detestation of the other, the world will naturally think that they act merely to acquit themselves in its sight in form, but in reality to evade their duty.  Yes, my Lords, the world must think that such persons palter with their sacred trust, and are tender to crimes because they look forward to the future possession of the same power which they now prosecute, and purpose to abuse it in the manner it has been abused by the criminal of whom they are so tender.

To remove such an imputation from us, we assert that the Commons of Great Britain are not to receive instructions about the language which they ought to hold from the gentlemen who have made profitable studies in the academies of Benares and of Oude.  We know, and therefore do not want to learn, how to comport ourselves in prosecuting the haughty and overgrown delinquents of the East.  We cannot require to be instructed by them in what words we shall express just indignation at enormous crimes; for we have the example of our great ancestors to teach us:  we tread in their steps, and we speak in their language.