Thus, if we pass the bill, we shall not even be able to boast the
petty merit of leaving the nation in its present state; we shall take
away the present restraints of vice, without substituting any in their
place; we shall, perhaps, deprive a few hardened drunkards of a small
part of the liquor which they now swallow, but shall open, according
to the expectation of the noble lord, fifty thousand houses of
licensed debauchery for the ruin of millions yet untainted.
To leave the nation in its present state, which is allowed on all
hands to be a state of corruption, seems to be the utmost ambition of
one of the noble lords, who has pleaded with the greatest warmth for
this bill; for he concluded, with an air of triumph, by asking, how we
can be censured for only suffering the nation to continue in its
former state?
We may be, in my opinion, my lords, censured as traitors to our trust,
and enemies to our country, if we permit any vice to prevail, when it
is in our power to suppress it. We may be cursed, with justice, by
posterity, as the abettors of that debauchery by which poverty and
disease shall be entailed upon them, contemned in the present as the
flatterers of those appetites which we ought to regulate, and insulted
by that populace whom we dare not oppose.
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