My lords, I have submitted to you, with the freedom and truth which I
think my duty, my sentiments on this awful situation. I have laid before
you the ruin of your power, the disgrace of your reputation, the
pollution of your discipline, the contamination of your morals, the
complication of calamities, foreign and domestic, that overwhelm your
sinking country. Your dearest interests, your own liberties, the
constitution itself, totters to the foundation. All this disgraceful
danger, this multitude of misery, is the monstrous offspring of this
unnatural war. We have been deceived and deluded too long. Let us now
stop short. This is the crisis, the only crisis of time and situation,
to give us a possibility of escape from the fatal effects of our
delusions. But if, in an obstinate and infatuated perseverance in folly,
we slavishly echo the peremptory words this day presented to us, nothing
can save this devoted country from complete and final ruin.
Is it possible, can it be believed, that ministers are yet blind to this
impending destruction? I did hope that instead of this false and empty
vanity, this overweening pride, that ministers would have humbled
themselves in their errors, would have confessed and retracted them, and
by an active though a late repentance, have endeavored to redeem them.
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