The Commons are too liberal not to allow for the difficulties of a great and arduous public situation.

They know too well the domineering necessities which frequently occur in all great affairs.
They know the exigency of a pressing occasion, which, in its precipitate career, bears everything down before it,--which does not give time to the mind to recollect its faculties, to reinforce its reason, and to have recourse to fixed principles, but, by compelling an instant and tumultuous decision, too often obliges men to decide in a manner that calm judgment would certainly have rejected.

We know, as we are to be served by men, that the persons who serve us must be tried as men, and with a very large allowance indeed to human infirmity and human error.
This, my Lords, we knew and we weighed before we came before you.

But the crimes which we charge in these articles are not lapses, defects, errors of common human frailty, which, as we know and feel, we can allow for.

We charge this offender with no crimes that have not arisen from passions which it is criminal to harbor,--with no offences that have not their root in avarice, rapacity, pride, insolence, ferocity, treachery, cruelty, malignity of temper,--in short, in [with ?] nothing that does not argue a total extinction of all moral principle, that does not manifest an inveterate blackness of heart, dyed in grain with malice, vitiated, corrupted, gangrened to the very core.