the effects of hunger and of cold; grant these, and then the law which compels the man without house or land to take up arms and risk his life in defence of the country, is a perfectly just law; but, deny to the necessitous that legal and certain relief of which I have been speaking; abolish the poor laws; and then this military-service law becomes an act of a character such as I defy any pen or tongue to describe. 52. To say another word upon the subject is certainly unnecessary; but we live in days when "_stern necessity_" has so often been pleaded for most flagrant departures from the law of the land, that one cannot help asking, whether there were any greater necessity to justify ADDINGTON for his deeds of 1817 than there would be to justify a starving man in taking a loaf? ADDINGTON pleaded _necessity_, and he got a Bill of _Indemnity_. And, shall a starving man be hanged, then, if he take a loaf to save himself from dying? When SIX ACTS were before the Parliament, the proposers and supporters of them never pretended that they did not embrace a most dreadful departure from the ancient laws of the land. In answer to LORD HOLLAND, who had dwelt forcibly on this departure from the ancient law, the Lord Chancellor, unable to contradict LORD HOLLAND, exclaimed, "_Salus populi suprema lex_," that is to say "_The salvation of the people is the first law_." Well, then, if the salvation of the people be the first law, the _salvation of life_ is really and bona fide the salvation of the people; and, if the ordinary laws may be dispensed with, in order to obviate a possible and speculative danger, surely they may be dispensed with, in cases where to dispense with them is visibly, demonstrably, notoriously, necessary to the salvation of _the lives_ of the people: surely, bread is as necessary to the lips of the starving man, as a new law could be necessary to prevent either house of parliament from being brought into _contempt_; and surely, therefore, _Salus populi suprema lex_ may come from the lips of the famishing people with as much propriety as they came from those of the Lord Chancellor!