those that are born and bred in England.  To go no farther than the case before us:  you are just as 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 kingdom ever held, and the continuance of as ample privileges as the House of Commons, in the plenitude of its power, had been habituated to assert.  But if we make ourselves too little for the sphere of our duty, if, on the contrary, we do not stretch and expand our minds to the compass of their object, be well assured that everything about us will dwindle by degrees, until at length our concerns are shrunk to the dimensions of our minds.  It is not a predilection to mean, sordid, home-bred cares that will avert the consequences of a false estimation of our interest, or prevent the shameful dilapidation into which a great empire must fall by mean reparations upon mighty ruins.