If money, therefore, cannot be raised but by this bill, if the expenses of the government cannot be defrayed but by corrupting the morals of the people, I shall without scruple declare, that money ought not to be raised, nor the designs of the government supported, because the people can suffer nothing from the failure of publick measures, or even from the dissolution of the government itself, which will be equally to be dreaded or avoided with an universal depravity of morals, and a general decay of corporeal vigour. Even the insolence of a foreign conqueror can inflict nothing more severe than the diseases which debauchery produces; nor can any thing be feared from the disorders of anarchy more dangerous or more calamitous, than the madness of sedition, or the miseries which must ensue to each individual from universal wickedness.
Such, my lords, is the expedient by which we are now about to raise the supplies for the present year; and such is the new method of taxation which the sagacity of our ministers has luckily discovered. A foreign war is to be supported by the destruction of our people at home, and the revenue of the government to be improved by the decay of our manufactures. We are to owe henceforward our power to epidemical diseases, our wealth to the declension of our commerce, and our security to riot and to tumult.
There is yet another consideration, my lords, which ought well to be regarded, before we suffer this bill to pass. Many laws are merely experimental, and have been made, not because the legislature thought them indisputably proper, but because no better could at that time be struck out, and because the arguments in their favour appeared stronger than those against them, or because the questions to which they related were so dark and intricate that nothing was to be determined with certainty, and no other method could therefore be followed, but that of making the first attempts at hazard, and correcting these errours, or supplying these defects which might hereafter be discovered by those lights which time should afford.
Though I am far from thinking, my lords, that the question relating to the effects of this law is either doubtful or obscure; though I am certain that the means of reforming the vice which its advocates pretend it is designed to prevent, are obvious and easy; yet I should have hoped, that the projectors of such a scheme would have allowed at least the uncertainty of the salutary effects expected from it, and would, therefore, have made some provision for the repeal of it when it should be found to fail.
But, my lords, our ministers appear to have thought it sufficient to endear them to their country, and immortalize their names, that they have invented a new method of raising money, and seem to have very little regard to any part of the art of government; they will, at least in their own opinion, have deserved applause, if they leave the publick revenue greater, by whatever diminution of the publick virtue.
They have, therefore, my lords, wisely contrived a necessity of continuing this law, whatever may be its consequences, and how fatal soever its abuses; for they not only mortgage the duties upon spirits for the present supply, but substitute them in the place of another security given to the bank by the pot act; and, therefore, since it will not be easy to form another tax of equal produce, we can have very little hope that this will be remitted.
There will be, indeed, only one method of setting the nation free from the calamities which this law will bring upon it; and as I doubt not but that method will at last be followed, it will certainly deserve the attention of your lordships, as the third consideration to which, in our debates on this bill, particular regard ought to be paid.
That the license of drunkenness, and the unlimited consumption of spirituous liquors, will fill the whole kingdom with idleness, diseases, riots, and confusion, cannot be doubted; nor can it be questioned, but that in a very short time the senate will be crowded with petitions from all the trading bodies in the kingdom, for the regulation of the workmen and servants, for the extinction of turbulence and riot, and for the removal of irresistible temptations to idleness and fraud. These representations may be for a time neglected, but must soon or late be heard; the ministers will be obliged to repeal this law, for the same reason that induced them to propose it. Idleness and sickness will impair our manufactures, and the diminution of our trade will lessen the revenue.
They will then, my lords, find that their scheme, with whatever prospects of profit it may now flatter them, was formed with no extensive views; and that it was only the expedient of political avarice, which sacrificed a greater distant advantage to the immediate satisfaction of present gain. They will find, that they have corrupted the people without obtaining any advantage by their crime, and that they must have recourse to some new contrivance by which their own errours may be retrieved.
In this distress, my lords, they can only do what indeed they now seem to design; they can only repeal this act by charging the debt, which it has enabled them to contract, upon the sinking fund, upon that sacred deposit which was for a time supposed unalienable, and from which arose all the hopes that were sometimes formed by the nation, of being delivered from that load of imposts, which it cannot much longer support. They can only give security for this new debt, by disabling us for ever from paying the former.