we mean to attack, and, with your Lordships' aid, to demolish, destroy, and subvert forever. My Lords, I must say, that in this business, which is a matter of collusion, concealment, and deceit, your Lordships will, perhaps, not feel the same degree of interest as in the others. Hitherto you have had before you crimes of dignity: you have had before you the ruin and expulsion of great and illustrious families, the breach of solemn public treaties, the merciless pillage and total subversion of the first houses in Asia. But the crimes which are the most striking to the imagination are not always the most pernicious in their effects: in these high, eminent acts of domineering tyranny, their very magnitude proves a sort of corrective to their virulence. The occasions on which they can be exercised are rare; the persons upon whom they can be exercised few; the persons who can exercise them, in the nature of things, are not many. These high tragic acts of superior, overbearing tyranny are privileged crimes; they are the unhappy, dreadful prerogative, they are the distinguished and incommunicable attributes, of superior wickedness in eminent station. But, my Lords, when the vices of low, sordid, and illiberal minds infect that high situation,--when theft, bribery, and peculation, attended with fraud, prevarication, falsehood, misrepresentation, and forgery--when all these follow in one train,--when these vices, which gender and spawn in dirt, and are nursed in dunghills, come and pollute with their slime that throne which ought to be a seat of dignity and purity, the evil is much greater; it may operate daily and hourly; it is not only imitable, but improvable, and it will be imitated, and will be improved, from the highest to the lowest, through all the gradations of a corrupt government. They are reptile vices. There are situations in which the acts of the individual are of some moment, the example comparatively of little importance. In the other, the mischief of the example is infinite.