competent to judge whether the sum of four millions sterling ought or
ought not to be passed from the public treasury into a private pocket
without any title except the claim of the parties, when the issue of
fact is laid in Madras, as when it is laid in Westminster. Terms of art,
indeed, are different in different places; but they are generally
understood in none. The technical style of an Indian treasury is not one
jot more remote than the jargon of our own Exchequer from the train of
our ordinary ideas or the idiom of our common language. The difference,
therefore, in the two cases is not in the comparative difficulty or
facility of the two subjects, but in our attention to the one and our
total neglect of the other. Had this attention and neglect been
regulated by the value of the several objects, there would be nothing to
complain of. But the reverse of that supposition is true. The scene of
the Indian abuse is distant, indeed; but we must not infer that the
value of our interest in it is decreased in proportion as it recedes
from our view. In our politics, as in our common conduct, we shall be
worse than infants, if we do not put our senses under the tuition of our
judgment, and effectually cure ourselves of that optical illusion which
makes a brier at our nose of greater magnitude than an oak at five
hundred yards' distance.

I think I can trace all the calamities of this country to the single
source of our not having had steadily before our eyes a general,
comprehensive, well-connected, and well-proportioned view of the whole
of our dominions, and a just sense of their true bearings and relations.
After all its reductions, the British empire is still vast and various.
After all the reductions of the House of Commons, (stripped as we are of
our brightest ornaments and of our most important privileges,) enough
are yet left to furnish us, if we please, with means of showing to the
world that we deserve the superintendence of as large an empire as this