experience, knowledge, and capacity, will induce your lordships to be of
the same opinion.

Lord HERVEY spoke next, to this effect:--My lords, as the bill now
before us is of a new kind, upon an occasion no less new, I have
endeavoured to bestow upon it a proportionate degree of attention, and
have considered it in all the lights in which I could place it; I have,
in my imagination, connected with it all the circumstances with which it
is accompanied, and all the consequences that it may produce either to
the present age, or to futurity; but the longer I reflect upon it, the
more firmly am I determined to oppose it; nor has deliberation any other
effect, than to crowd my thoughts with new arguments against it, and to
heighten dislike to detestation.

It must, my lords, immediately occur to every man, at the first mention
of the method of proceeding now proposed, that it is such as nothing but
extreme necessity can vindicate; that the noble person against whom it
is contrived, must be a monster burdensome to the world; that his crimes
must be at once publick and enormous, and that he has been already
condemned by all maxims of justice, though he has had the subtilty to
escape by some unforeseen defect in the forms of law. It might be
imagined, my lords, that there were the most evident marks of guilt in
the conduct of the man thus censured, that he fled from the justice of
his country, that he had openly suborned witnesses in his favour, or
had, by some artifice certainly known, obstructed the evidence that was
to have been brought against him. It might at least be reasonably
conceived, that his crimes were of such a kind as might in their own
nature easily be concealed, and that, therefore, some extraordinary
measures were necessary for the discovery of wickedness which lay out of
the reach of common inquiry.