My Lords, at this awful close, in the name of the Commons, and surrounded by them, I attest the retiring, I attest the advancing generations, between which, as a link in the great chain of eternal order, we stand.  We call this nation, we call the world to witness, that the Commons have shrunk from no labor, that we have been guilty of no prevarication, that we have made no compromise with crime, that we have not feared any odium whatsoever, in the long warfare which we have carried on with the crimes, with the vices, with the exorbitant wealth, with the enormous and overpowering influence of Eastern corruption.  This war, my Lords, we have waged for twenty-two years, and the conflict has been fought at your Lordships’ bar for the last seven years.  My Lords, twenty-two years is a great space in the scale of the life of man; it is no inconsiderable space in the history of a great nation.  A business which has so long occupied the councils and the tribunals of Great Britain cannot possibly be huddled over in the course of vulgar, trite, and transitory events.  Nothing but some of those great revolutions that break the traditionary chain of human memory, and alter the very face of Nature itself, can possibly obscure it.  My Lords, we are all elevated to a degree of importance by it; the meanest of us will, by means of it, more or less become the concern of posterity,—­if we are yet to hope for such a thing, in the present state of the world, as a recording, retrospective, civilized posterity:  but this is in the hands of the great Disposer of events; it is not ours to settle how it shall be.

My Lords, your House yet stands,—­it stands as a great edifice; but let me say, that it stands in the midst of ruins,—­in the midst of the ruins that have been made by the greatest moral earthquake that ever convulsed and shattered this globe of ours.  My Lords, it has pleased Providence to place us in such a state that we appear every moment to be upon the verge of some great mutations.  There is one thing, and one thing only, which defies all mutation,—­that which existed before the world, and will survive the fabric of the world itself:  I mean justice,—­that justice which, emanating from the Divinity, has a place in the breast of every one of us, given us for our guide with regard to ourselves and with regard to others, and which will stand, after this globe is burned to ashes, our advocate or our accuser before the great Judge, when He comes to call upon us for the tenor of a well-spent life.

My Lords, the Commons will share in every fate with your Lordships; there is nothing sinister which can happen to you, in which we shall not be involved:  and if it should so happen that we shall be subjected to some of those frightful changes which we have seen,—­if it should happen that your Lordships, stripped of all the decorous distinctions of human society, should, by hands at once base and cruel, be led to those scaffolds and machines of murder upon which great kings and glorious queens have shed their blood, amidst the prelates, amidst the nobles, amidst the magistrates who supported their thrones, may you in those moments feel that consolation which I am persuaded they felt in the critical moments of their dreadful agony!