crews by rigorous impresses, without employing them either to guard our
trade, or subdue our enemies?

If the senate is not to be suffered to inquire into affairs like these,
it is no longer any security to the people, that they have the right of
electing representatives; and unless they may carry their inquiries back
as far as they shall think it necessary, the most acute sagacity may be
easily eluded; causes may be very remote from their consequences, the
original motives of a long train of wicked measures may lie hid in some
private transaction of former years, and those advantages which our
enemies have been of late suffered to obtain, were perhaps sold them at
some forgotten congress by some secret article.

Such are, probably, the private transactions which the honourable
gentleman is so much afraid of exposing to the light; transactions in
which the interest of this nation has been meanly yielded up by
cowardice, or sold by treachery; in which Britain has been considered as
a province subordinate to some other country, or in which the minister
has enriched himself by the sacrifice of the publick rights.

It has been, indeed, alleged with some degree of candour, that many of
our treaties were provisions against invasions which perhaps were never
intended, and calculated to defeat measures which only our own cowardice
disposed us to fear. That such treaties have, indeed, been made, Hanover
is a sufficient witness; but however frequently they may occur, they may
surely be discovered with very little disadvantage to the nation; they
will prove only the weakness of those that made them, who were at one
time intimidated by chimerical terrours, and at another, lulled into
confidence by airy security.