afford the unprejudiced and attentive an opportunity of discovering the
right. While they think themselves under a necessity of reasoning, they
cannot but show the force of a just argument, by the unsuccessfulness of
their endeavours to confute it, and the propriety of an useful and
salutary motion, by the slight objections which they raise against it.
They cannot but find themselves sometimes forced to discover what they
can never be expected to acknowledge, the weakness of their own reasons,
by deserting them when they are pressed with contrary assertions, and
seeking a subterfuge in new arguments equally inconclusive and
contemptible. They show the superiority of their opponents, like other
troops, by retreating before them, and forming one fortification behind
another, in hopes of wearying those whom they cannot hope to repulse.

Of this conduct we have had already an instance in the present debate; a
debate managed with such vigour, order, and resolution, as sufficiently
shows the advantage of regular discipline long continued, and proves,
that troops may retain their skill and spirit, even when they are
deprived of that leader, to whose instructions and example they were
indebted for them. When first this motion was offered, it seems to have
been their chief hope to divert us from it by outcries of impossibility,
by representing it as the demand of men unacquainted with the state of
our offices, or the multiplicity of transactions, in which the
indefatigable industry of our ministers has been employed; and they have
therefore endeavoured to persuade us, that they are only discouraging us
from an insuperable labour, and advising us to desist from measures
which we cannot live to accomplish.

But when they found, sir, that their exaggerations produced merriment
instead of terrour, that their opponents were determined to try their
strength against impossibility, that they were resolved to launch out