Give me leave to ask you, Sir, how you reconcile a proposition to enforce this novel practice with the spirit of that Constitution of which you profess to be so great an admirer, and with that freedom of which you wish to be regarded as one of the principal supporters? What I am opposed to, and what I am alarmed at, is the proposition to obtain an Act of Parliament which would in its operation be nothing short of compulsion on every man to suffer the veins of his child to be impregnated with the disease of a beast--a measure to be adopted in no country where the people are not vassals or slaves. Lastly came these remarks which at this day have force and application greater even than when written-- I like not this never-ending recurrence to Acts of Parliament. Something must be left, and something _ought_ to be left, to the sense and reason and morality and religion of the people. There are a set of _well-meaning men_ in this country, who would pass laws for the regulating and restraining of every feeling of the human breast, and every motion of the human frame: they would bind us down, hair by hair, as the Liliputians did Gulliver, till anon, when we awoke from our sleep, we should wonder by whom we had been enslaved. But I trust, Sir, that Parliament is not, and never will be, so far under the influence of these minute and meddling politicians as to be induced to pass laws for taking out of a man’s hands the management of his household, the choice of his physician, and the care of the health of his children; for, under this sort of domiciliary thraldom, to talk of the liberty of the country would be the most cruel mockery wherewith an humble and subjected people were ever insulted.[181]