animadversion of the English press.

Some

than those democratical forms which have | well as for the brilliant qualities which dis been the subject of so much contest. So tinguished their character. But none of that I may venture to say, England has not these circumstances,-no dread of their reonly in its forms the most democratical gov-sentment,-no admiration of their talents,ernment that ever existed in a great country, no consideration for their rank,-silenced the but, in substance, has the most democratical government that ever existed in any country; if the most substantial democracy be that state in which the greatest number of men feel an interest and express an opinion upon political questions, and in which the greatest number of judgments and wills concur in influencing public measures.

of you remember,-all of you know, that a loud and unanimous cry of reprobation and execration broke out against them from every part of this kingdom. It was perfectly un influenced by any considerations of our own mere national interest, which might perhaps be supposed to be rather favourably affected The same circumstance gave great addi- by that parution. It was not, as in some tional importance to our discussion of conti- other countries, the indignation of rival rob nental politics. That discussion was no bers, who were excluded from their share of longer, as in the preceding century, confined the prey: it was the moral anger of disinte to a few pamphlets, written and read only rested spectators against atrocious crimes,— by men of education and rank, which reach- the gravest and the most dignified moral ed the multitude very slowly and rarely. principle which the God of Justice has imIn newspapers an almost daily appeal was planted in the human heart,-that one, the made, directly or indirectly, to the judgment dread of which is the only restraint on the and passions of almost every individual in the actions of powerful criminals, and the prokingdom upon the measures and principles mulgation of which is the only punishment not only of his own country, but of every that can be inflicted on them. It is a restate in Europe. Under such circumstances, straint which ought not to be weakened: it the tone of these publications in speaking of is a punishment which no good man can deforeign governments became a matter of im-sire to mitigate. That great crime was portance. You will excuse me, therefore, spoken of as it deserved in England. Robif, before I conclude, I remind you of the bery was not described by any courtly cirgeneral nature of their language on one or two cumlocutions: rapine was not called "polivery remarkable occasions, and of the bold-cy:" nor was the oppression of an innocent ness with which they arraigned the crimes people termed a "mediation" in their doof powerful sovereigns, without any check mestic differences. No prosecutions,—no from the laws and magistrates of their own Criminal Inormations followed the liberty country. This toleration, or rather this pro-and the boldness of the language then emtection, was too long and uniform to be acci- ployed. No complaints even appear to have dental. I am, indeed, very much mistaken been made from abroad;—much less any if it be not founded upon a policy which this insolent menaces against the free constitucountry cannot abandon without sacrificing tion which protected the English press.her liberty and endangering her national The people of England were too long known throughout Europe for the proudest potentate to expect to silence our press by such means.

existence.

The first remarkable instance which I shall choose to state of the unpunished and protected boldness of the English press,—-of I pass over the second partition of Poland the freedom with which they animadverted in 1792 (you all remember what passed on on the policy of powerful sovereigns, is on that occasion-the universal abhorrence exthe Partition of Poland in 1772,-an act not pressed by every man and every writer of perhaps so horrible in its means, nor so de- every party,-the succours that were pub plorable in its immediate effects, as some licly preparing by large bodies of individuals other atrocious invasions of national inde- of all parties for the oppressed Poles); I pendence which have followed it, but the hasten to the final dismemberment of that most abominable in its general tendency unhappy kingdom, which seems to me the and ultimate consequences of any political most striking example in our history of the crime recorded in history, because it was the habitual, principled, and deeply-rooted forfirst practical breach in the system of Eu- bearance of those who administer the law rope, the first example of atrocious robbery towards political writers. We were engaged perpetrated on unoffending countries, which in the most extensive, bloody, and dangerous has been since so liberally followed, and war that this country ever knew; and the which has broken down all the barriers of parties to the dismemberment of Poland habit and principle that guarded defence- were our allies, and our only powerful and less states. The perpetrators of this atro-effective allies. We had every motive of cious crime were the most powerful sove- policy to court their friendship: every reason reigns of the Continent, whose hostility it of state seemed to require that we should certainly was not the interest of Great Britain wantonly to incur. They were the most lustrious princes of their age; and some of them were doubtless entitled to the highest praise for their domestic administration, as

not permit them to be abused and vilified by English writers. What was the fact? Did any Englishman consider himself at liberty, on account of temporary interests, however urgent, to silence those feelings of

humanity and justice which guard the cer- and its fortune so lamentable !"-made a

tain and permanent interests of all coun- deep impression on the people of England. tries? You all remember that every voice, I will ask my Learned Friend, if we had and every pen, and every press in England then been at peace with the French republic, were unceasingly employed to brand that whether we must have been silent specta abominable robbery. You remember that tors of the foulest crimes that ever blotted this was not confined to private writers, but the name of humanity?—whether we must, that the same abhorrence was expressed by like cowards and slaves, have repressed the every member of both Houses of Parliament compassion and indignation with which that who was not under the restraints of ministe- horrible scene of tyranny had filled cur rial reserve. No minister dared even to hearts? Let me suppose, Gentlemen, that blame the language of honest indignation Aloys Reding, who has displayed in our which might be very inconvenient to his times the simplicity, magnanimity, and piety most important political projects; and I of ancient heroes, had, after his glorious hope I may venture to say, that no English struggle, honoured this kingdom by choosing assembly would have endured such a sacri- it as his refuge,-that, after performing profice of eternal justice to any miserable in-digies of valour at the head of his handful terest of an hour. Did the Law-officers of of heroic peasants on the field of Morgarten the Crown venture to come into a court of (where his ancestor, the Landamman Reding, justice to complain of the boldest of the had, five hundred years before, defeated the publications of that time? They did not. first oppressors of Switzerland), he had seI do not say that they felt any disposition to lected this country to be his residence, as do so;-I believe that they could not. But the chosen abode of liberty, as the ancient I do say, that if they had,-if they had and inviolable asylum of the oppressed, spoken of the necessity of confining our would my Learned Friend have had the political writers to cold narrative and un- boldness to have said to this hero, "that he feeling argument,-if they had informed a must hide his tears" (the tears shed by a jury, that they did not prosecute history, but hero over the ruins of his country!) "lest invective,--that if private writers be at liberty they might provoke the resentment of Reuat all to blame great princes, it must be with bell or Rapinat,—that he must smother the moderation and decorum,-the sound heads sorrow and the anger with which his heart and honest hearts of an English jury would was loaded,-that he must breathe his murhave confounded such sophistry, and would murs low, lest they might be overheard by have declared, by their verdict, that mode- the oppressor!" Would this have been the ration of language is a relative term, which language of my Learned Friend? I know varies with the subject to which it is ap- that it would not. I know, that by such a plied, that atrocious crimes are not to be supposition, I have done wrong to his honourrelated as calmly and coolly as indifferent or able feelings-to his honest English heart. trifling events, that if there be a decorum I am sure that he knows as well as I do, that due to exalted rank and authority, there is a nation which should thus receive the opalso a much more sacred decorum due to pressed of other countries, would be prepa Wrtue and to human nature, which would be ring its own neck for the yoke. He knows outraged and trampled under foot, by speak- the slavery which such a nation would deing of guilt in a lukewarm language, falsely serve, and must speedily incur. He knows, called moderate. that sympathy with the unmerited sufferings of others, and disinterested anger against their oppressors, are, if I may so speak, the masters which are appointed by Providence to teach us fortitude in the defence of our own rights, that selfishness is a dastardly principle, which betrays its charge and flies from its post,-and that those only can de fend themselves with valour, who are animated by the moral approbation with which they can survey their sentiments towards others,-who are ennobled in their own eyes by a consciousness that they are fighting for justice as well as interest,-a consciousness which none can feel, but those who have felt for the wrongs of their brethren. These are the sentiments which my Learned Friend would have felt. He would have told the hero:-"Your confidence is not deceived: this is still that England, of which the tory may, perhaps, have contributed to your heart with the heroism of liberty. Every other country of Europe is crouching under the bloody tyrants who destroyed you country: we are unchanged. We are stil

Soon after, Gentlemen, there followed an act, in comparison with which all the deeds of rapine and blood perpetrated in the world are innocence itself,-the invasion and destruction of Switzerland,—that unparalleled scene of guilt and enormity,-that unprovoked aggression against an innocent country, which had been the sanctuary of peace and liberty for three centuries,-respected as a sort of sacred territory by the fiercest ambition, raised, like its own mountains, beyond the region of the storms which raged around on every side, the only warlike people that never sent forth armies to disturb their neighbours,-the only government that ever accumulated treasures without imposing taxes, an innocent treasure, unstained by the tears of the poor, the inviolate patrimony of the commonwealth, which attested the virtue of a long series of magistrates, but which at length caught the eye of the spoiler, and became the fatal occasion of their ruin! Gentlemen, the destruction of such a country,-"its cause so innocent,

pire of the Continent, I will ask my Learned Friend, if we had then been at peace with France, how English writers were to relate them so as to escape the charge of libelling a friendly government?

the same people which received with open | arins the victims of the tyranny of Philip II. and Louis XIV. We shall not exercise a cowardly and clandestine humanity. Here we are not so dastardly as to rob you of your greatest consolation;-here, protected When Robespierre, in the debates in the by a free, brave, and high-minded people, National Convention on the mode of muryou may give vent to your indignation,-you dering their blameless sovereign, objected to may proclaim the crimes of your tyrants, the formal and tedious mode of murde. you may devote them to the execration of mankind. There is still one spot upon earth in which they are abhorred, without being dreaded !"

-

called a "trial," and proposed to put him immediately to death without trial, "on the principles of insurrection,"—because to doubt the guilt of the King would be to doubt of I am aware, Gentlemen, that I have al- the innocence of the Convention, and if the ready abused your indulgence; but I must King were not a traitor, the Convention must entreat you to bear with me for a short time be rebels, would my Learned Friend have longer, to allow me to suppose a case which had an English writer state all this with might have occurred, in which you will see "decorum and moderation?" Would he the horrible consequences of enforcing rigor- have had an English writer state, that though ously principles of law, which I cannot con- this reasoning was not perfectly agreeable to test, against political writers. We might our national laws, or perhaps to our national have been at peace with France during the prejudices, yet it was not for him to make whole of that terrible period which elapsed any observations on the judicial proceedings between August 1792 and 1794, which has of foreign states? When Marat, in the same been usually called the "reign of Robes- Convention, called for two hundred and sepierre!"-the only series of crimes, perhaps, venty thousand heads, must our English in history, which, in spite of the common writers have said, that the remedy did, indisposition to exaggerate extraordinary facts, deed, seem to their weak judgment rather has been beyond measure under-rated in severe; but that it was not for them to judge public opinion. I say this, Gentlemen, after the conduct of so illustrious an assembly as an investigation, which I think entitles me the National Convention, or the suggestions to affirm it with confidence. Men's minds of so enlightened a statesman as M. Marat? were oppressed by the atrocity and the mul- When that Convention resounded with aptitude of crimes; their humanity and their plause at the news of several hundred aged indolence took refuge in scepticism from priests being thrown into the Loire, and parsuch an overwhelming mass of guilt: and ticularly at the exclamation of Carrier, who the consequence was, that all these unparal- communicated the intelligence:-"What a leled enormities, though proved, not only revolutionary torrent is the Loire !"-when with the fullest historical, but with the strict- these suggestions and narratives of murder, est judicial evidence, were at the time only which have hitherto been only hinted and half-believed, and are now scarcely half-re- whispered in the most secret cabals, in the membered. When these atrocities, of which darkest caverns of banditti, were triumphantthe greatest part are as little known to the ly uttered, patiently endured, and even loudpublic in general as the campaigns of Gen-ly applauded by an assembly of seven hunghis Khan, but are still protected from the scrutiny of men by the immensity of those voluminous records of guilt in which they are related, and under the mass of which they will lie buried, till some historian be found with patience and courage enough to drag them forth into light, for the shame, indeed, but for the instruction of mankind, which had the peculiar malignity, through the pretexts with which they were covered, of making the noblest objects of human pursuit seem odious and detestable,-which had almost made the names of liberty, reformation, and humanity, synonymous with anaray, robbery, and murder, which thus areatened not only to extinguish every principle of improvement, to arrest the progress of civilized society, and to disinherit future generations of that rich succession to be expected from the knowledge and wisdom of the present, but to destroy the civilization of Europe (which never gave such a proof of its vigour and robustness, as in being able O resist their destructive power),-when all hese horrors were acting in the greatest en:

dred men, acting in the sight of all Europe, would my Learned Friend have wished that there had been found in England a single, writer so base as to deliberate upon the most safe, decorous, and polite manner of relating all these things to his countrymen? When Carrier ordered five hundred children under fourteen years to be shot, the greater part of whom escaped the fire from their size,when the poor victims ran for protection to the soldiers, and were bayoneted clinging round their knees, would my Friend—But I cannot pursue the strain of interrogation; it is too much! It would be a violence which I cannot practise on my own feelings; it would be an outrage to my Friend; it would be an affront to you; it would be an insult to humanity.

No! better, ten thousand times better, would it be that every press in the world were burnt,-that the very use of letters were abolished,-that we were returned to the honest ignorance of the rudest times. than at the results of civilization should be made subservient to the purposes of barbar

ism;--than that literature should be employed | satirist* from his fangs, and sent out with to teach a toleration for cruelty,—to weaken moral hatred for guilt, to deprave and brutalise the human mind. I know that I speak my Friend's feelings as well as my own, when I say, God forbid that the dread of any punishment should ever make any Englishman an accomplice in so corrupting his countrymen, a public teacher of depravity and barbarity!

defeat and disgrace the Usurper's Attorney General from what he had the impudence te call his court! Even then, Gentlemen, wher all law and liberty were trampled under the feet of a military banditti,-when those great crimes were perpetrated in a high place and with a high hand against those who were the objects of public veneration, which more than any thing else upon earth overwhelm the minds of men, break their spirits, and confound their moral sentiments, obliterate the distinctions between right and wrong in their understanding, and teach the multitude to feel no longer any reverence for that justice which they thus see triumphantly dragged at the chariot wheels of a tyrant,-even then, when this unhappy country, triumphant indeed abroad, but enslaved at home, had no prospect but that of a long succession of tyrants "wading through slaughter to a throne,"- -even then, I say, when all seemed lost, the unconquerable spirit of English liberty survived in the hearts of English jurors. That spirit is, I trust in God, not extinct: and if any modern tyrant were, in the plenitude of his insolence, to hope to overawe an English jury, I trust and I believe

braved the bayonets of Cromwell;—we bid defiance to yours. Contempsi Catilinæ gladios;-non pertimescam tuos !"

Mortifying and horrible as the idea is, I must remind you, Gentlemen, that even at that time, even under the reign of Robespierre, my Learned Friend, if he had then been Attorney-General, might have been compelled by some most deplorable necessity, to have come into this Court to ask your verdict against the libellers of Barrère and Collot d'Herbois. Mr. Peltier then employed his talents against the enemies of the human race, as he has uniformly and bravely done. I do not believe that any peace, any political considerations, any fear of punishment, would have silenced him. He has shown too much honour and constancy, and intrepidity, to be shaken by such circumstances as these. My Learned Friend might then have been compelled to have filed a Criminal Information against Mr. Peltier, for "wickedly and ma-that they would tell him:-"Our ancestors liciously intending to vilify and degrade Maximilian Robespierre, President of the Committee of Public Safety of the French Republic!" He might have been reduced What could be such a tyrant's means of to the sad necessity of appearing before you overawing a jury? As long as their country to belie his own better feelings by prose- exists, they are girt round with impenetrable cuting Mr. Peltier for publishing those sen- armour. Till the destruction of their country, timents which my Friend himself had a thou-no danger can fall upon them for the persand times felt, and a thousand times ex-formance of their duty. And I do trust that pressed. He might have been obliged even there is no Englishman so unworthy of life to call for punishment upon Mr. Peltier, for as to desire to outlive England. But if any language which he and all mankind would of us are condemned to the cruel punishment for ever despise Mr. Peltier, if he were not of surviving our country,-if in the inscruta to employ. Then indeed, Gentlemen, we ble counsels of Providence, this favoured should have seen the last humiliation fall on seat of justice and liberty,—this noblest England; the tribunals, the spotless and work of human wisdom and virtue, be des venerable tribunals of this free country, re- tined to destruction (which I shall not be duced to be the ministers of the vengeance charged with national prejudice for saying of Robespierre! What could have rescued would be the most dangerous wound ever us from this last disgrace ?-the honesty and inflicted on civilization), at least let us carry courage of a jury. They would have de- with us into our sad exile the consolation livered the judges of their country from the that we ourselves have not violated the dire necessity of inflicting punishment on a rights of hospitality to exiles,-that we have brave and virtuous man, because he spoke not torn from the altar the suppliant whe truth of a monster. They would have de- claimed protection as the voluntary victim spised the threats of a foreign tyrant as their of loyalty and conscience. ancestors braved the power of oppressors at Gentlemen, I now leave this unfortunate home. gentleman in your hands. His character and In the court where we are now met, Crom-his situation might interest your humanity: well twice sent a satirist on his tyranny to be convicted and punished as a libeiler, and n this court, almost in sight of the scaffold streaming with the blood of his Sovereign, within hearing of the clash of his bayonets which drove out Parliaments with scorn and contumely, -a jury twice rescued the intrepid

but, on his behalf, I only ask justice from you. I only ask a favourable construction of what cannot be said to be more than ambigu ous language; and this you will soon be told from the highest authority is a part of justice.

* Lilburne.

A CHARGE,

DELIVERED

TO THE GRAND JURY OF THE ISLAND OF BOMBAY,