sensibility and emotion. * I do not, I am sure, charge him with acting a part to seduce you; on the contrary, I am persuaded from my own feelings, and from my acquaintance with my friend, from our childhood upwards, that he. expressed himself as he felt. But, gentlemen, if he felt those painful embarrassments, think what mine must be: he can only feel for the august character whom he represents in this place, as a subject for his sovereign, too far removed by custom, and by law, from the intercourses which generate affections, to produce any other sentiments than those that flow from a relation common to us all. But it will be remembered, that I stand in the same relationt towards another great person, more deeply implicated by this supposed letter, who, not restrained from the cultivation of personal attachment by those qualifications which must always secure them, has exalted my duty of a subject to a prince, into a warm and honest affection between man and man. Thus circumstanced, I certainly should have been glad to have had an earlier opportunity of knowing correctly the contents of this letter, and whether, which I positively deny, it proceeded from the defendant. Coming thus suddenly upon us, I see but too plainly the impression it has made upon you who are to try the cause, and I feel its weight upon myself, who am to conduct it; but this shall neither detach me from my duty, nor, added to all the other difficulties that thicken around me, enervate me, if I can help it, in the discharge of it.

Gentlemen, if the attorney general is well founded in the commentaries he has made to you upon this book which he prosecutes, if he is warranted by the law of England, in repressing its circulation through these realms, from the illegal and dangerous matters contained in it; if that suppression be, as he avows it, and as in common sense it must be, the sole object of the prosecution, the publick has great reason to lament that this letter should have been at all brought into the service of the cause. It is no part of the charge upon the record; it had no existence for months after the work was composed and published; it was not even written, if written at all, till after he had been at Dover, in a manner insultingly expelled from the country by the influence of government, and had become the subject of another country. It cannot, therefore, by any fair inference, even decypher the mind of the author when he composed his work; still less can it affect the construction of the language in which the work itself is written. The introduction of this letter at all is, therefore, not only a departure from the charge, but a sort of dereliction of the object of the prosecution, which is to condemn the book. For if the condemnation of the author is to be obtained, not by the work itself, but by collateral matter not even existing when it was written, nor known to its various publishers throughout the kingdom, how can a verdict upon such gounds condemn the work, or criminate other publishers, strangers to the collateral matter on which the conviction may be obtained? I maintain, therefore, that, upon every principle of sound policy, as it affects the interests of the crown, and upon every rule of justice, as it affects the author of the Rights of Man, the letter should be wholly dismissed from your consideration.

Gentlemen, the attorney general has thought it necessary to inform you, that a rumour had been spread, and had reached his ears, that he only carried on the prosecution as a publick prosecutor, but without the concurrence of his own private judgment; and therefore to add the just weight of his own character to his publick duty, and to repel what he thinks a calumny, he tells you that he should have deserved to have been driven from society, if he had not arraigned the work and the author before you.

1

Here too we stand in situations very different. I have no doubt of the existence of such a rumour, and of its having reached his ears, because he says so; but for the narrow circle in which any rumour, personally implicating my learned friend's character, has extended, I might appeal to the multitudes who surround us, and ask, which of all of them, except the few connected in office with the crown, ever heard of its existence. But with regard to myself, every man who hears me at this moment, nay, the whole people of England, have been witnesses to the calumnious clamour that, by every art, has been raised and kept up against me. In every place, where business or pleasure collect the publick together, day after day my name and character have been the topicks of injurious reflection. And for what? only for not having shrunk from the discharge of a duty which no personal advantage recommended, and which a thousand difficulties repelled. But, gentlemen, I have no complaint to make, either against the printers of these libels, or even against their authors. The greater part of them, hurried perhaps away by honest prejudices may have believed they were serving their country by rendering me the object of its suspicion and contempt; and if there have been amongst them others who have mixed in it from personal malice and unkindness, I thank God I can forgive them also. Little indeed did they know me who thought that such proceedings would influence my conduct : I will for ever, at all hazards, assert the dignity, independence, and integrity of the English bar; without which, impartial justice, the most valuable part of the English constitution can have no existence. For from the moment that any advocate can be permitted to say that he will or will not stand between the crown and the subject arraigned in the court where he daily sits to practise, from that moment the liberties of England are at an end. If the advocate refuses to defend, from what he may think of

d

the charge or of the defence, he assumes the character of the judge; nay, he assumes it before the hour of judgment; and in proportion to his rank and reputation, puts the heavy influence of perhaps a mistaken opinion into the scale against the accused, in whose favour the benevolent principle of English law makes all presumptions, and which commands the very judge to be his counsel.

Gentlemen, it is now my duty to address myself regularly, and without digression, to the defence. And the first thing which presents itself in the discussion of a judicial subject, and indeed of every other, is to state distinctly and with precision, what the question is, and, where prejudice and misrepresentation have been exerted, to distinguish it accurately from what it is not. The question then is not whether the constitution of our fathers under which we live, under which I present myself before you, and under which alone you have any jurisdiction to hear me, be or be not preferable to the constitution of America or France, or any other human constitution. For upon what principle can a court, constituted by the authority of any government, and administering a positive system of law under it, pronounce a decision against the constitution which creates its authority; or the rule of action which its jurisdiction is to enforce? The common sense of the most uninformed person must revolt at such an absurd supposition.

I have no difficulty, therefore, in admitting, that if by accident some or all of you were alienated in opinion and affection from the forms and principles of the English government, and were impressed with the value of that unmixed representative constitution which this work recommends and inculcates, you could not on that account acquit the defendant. Nay, to speak out plainly, I freely admit; that even if you were avowed enemies to monarchy, and devoted to republicanism, you would be nevertheless bound by your oaths, as a jury sworn to administer English justice, to convict the author of the Rights of Man,

if it were brought home to your consciences, that he had exceeded those widely extended bounds which the ancient wisdom and liberal policy of the English constitution have allotted to the range of a free press. I freely concede this, because you have no jurisdiction to judge either the author or the work by any rule but by the English law, which is the source of your authority. But having made this large concession, it follows, by a consequence so inevitable as to be invulnerable to all argument or artifice, that, if on the other hand, you should be impressed, which I know you to be, not only with a dutiful regard, but with an enthusiasm for the whole form and substance of your own government; and though you should think that this work, in its circulation amongst classes of men unequal to political researches, may tend to alienate opinion, still you cannot, upon these grounds, without a similar breach of duty, convict the defendant of a libel, unless he has clearly stepped beyond that extended range of communication which the same ancient wisdom and liberal policy of the British constitution have allotted for the liberty of the press.

Gentlemen, I admit with the attorney general, that in every case where a court has to estimate the quality of a writing, the mind and intention of the writer must be taken into the account; the bona, or mala fides, as lawyers express it, must be examined. For a writing may undoubtedly proceed from a motive, and be directed to a purpose, not to be decyphered by the mere construction of the thing written. But wherever a writing is arraigned as seditious or slanderous not upon its ordinary construction in language, nor from the necessary consequences of its publication, under any circumstances and at all times, but that the criminality springs from some extrinsick matter, not visible upon the page itself; nor univer-sally operative, but capable only of being connected with it by evidence, so as to demonstrate the effect of the publication, and the design of the publisher; such a writing not libellous per se, cannot be arraigned as the author of a work is arraigned upon the record