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 and condemned,
can hardly be subject of surprise.
It has been stated that the persons in the temporary possession of
frames connive at their destruction; if this be proved upon inquiry, it
were necessary that such material accessories to the crime should be
principals in the punishment. But I did hope, that any measure proposed
by his Majesty's government for your Lordships' decision, would have had
conciliation for its basis; or, if that were hopeless, that some
previous inquiry, some deliberation, would have been deemed requisite;
not that we should have been called at once, without examination and
without cause, to pass sentences by wholesale, and sign death-warrants
blindfold.
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