horrible consequences of enforcing rigorously principles of law, which I cannot contest, against political writers, We might have been at peace with France during the whole of that terrible period which elapsed between August 1792 and 1794, which has been usually called the reign of Robespierre! The only series of crimes, perhaps, in history, which, in spite of the common disposition to exaggerate extraordinary facts, has been beyond measure under-rated in public opinion. I say this, gentlemen, after an investigation, which I think entitles me to affirm it with confidence. Men's minds were oppressed by the atrocity and the multitude of crimes; their humanity and their indolence took refuge in scepticism from such an overwhelming mass of guilt; and the consequence was, that all these unparalleled enormities, though proved, not only with the fullest historical, but with the strictest judicial evidence, were at the time only half believed, and are now scarcely half-remembered. When these atrocities were daily perpetrating, of which the greatest part are as little known to the public in general as the campaigns of Genghis 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; when these crimes were perpetrating, which had the peculiar malignity, from the pretexts with which they were covered, of making the noblest objects of human pursuit seem odious and detestible; which had almost made the names of liberty, reformation, and humanity, synonymous with anarchy, robbery, and murder; which thus, threatened not only to extinguish every principle of improvement, to arrest the progress of civi lized society, and to disinherit future generations of that rich succession, which they were entitled to expect from the knowledge and wisdom of the present, but to destroy the civilization of Europe, which never gave such a proof of its vigor and robustness, as in being able to resist their destructive power; when all these horrors were acting in the greatest empire 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? "When Robespierre, in the debates in the National Convention on the mode of murdering their blameless sovereign, objected to the formal and tedious mode of murder 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 the innocence of the convention, and if the king were not a traitor, the convention must be rebels! would my learned friend have had an English writer state all this with decorum and moderation?' would he have had an English writer state, that though this reasoning was not perfectly agreeable to our national laws, or perhaps to our national prejudices, yet it was not for him to make any observations on the judicial proceedings of foreign states? "When Marat, in the same convention, called for two hundred and seventy thousand heads, must our English writers have said, that the remedy did, indeed, seem to their weak judgment rather severe; but that it was not for them to judge the conduct of so illustrious an assembly as the national convention, or the suggestions of so enlightened a statesman as M. Marat? "When that convention resounded with applause at the news of several hundred aged priests being thrown into the Loire, and particularly at the exclamation of Carrier, who communicated the intelligence, What a revolutionary torrent is the Loire!' when these suggestions and narratives of murder, which have hitherto been only hinted and whispered in the most secret cabals, in the darkest caverns of banditti, were triumphantly uttered, patiently endured, and even loudly applauded by an assem bly of seven hundred 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 and so 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 run for protection to the soldiers, and were bayonetted 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 practice 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 that the results of civilization should be made subservient to the purposes of barbarism-than that literature should be employed. to teach a toleration for cruelty, to weaken moral hatred for guilt, to deprave and brutalize 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 corrupt ing ing his countrymen, a public teacher of depravity and barbarity! "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 Barrere 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 shewn too much honor 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 maliciously intending to vilify and degrade Maximilian Robespierre, president of the committee of public safety of the French Republic!' He might have been reduced to the sad necessity of appearing before you to bely his own better feelings; to prosecute' Mr. PELTIER for publishing those sentiments which my friend himself had a thousand times felt, and a thousand times expressed. He might have been obliged even to call for punishment upon Mr. PELTIER, for language which he and all mankind would for ever despise Mr. PELTIER if he were not to employ. Then indeed, gentlemen, we should have seen the last humiliation fall on England; the tribunals, the spotless and venerable tribunals of this free country, reduced to be the ministers of the vengeance of Robespierre! What could have rescued us from this last disgrace? The honesty and courage of a jury. They would have delivered the judges of their country from the the dire necessity of inflicting punishment on a brave and virtuous man, because he spoke truth of a monster. They would have despised the threats of a foreign tyrant as their ancestors braved the power of oppressors at home, "In the court where we are now met, Cromwell twice sent a satirist on his tyranny to be convicted and punished as a libeller, and in this court, almost in sight of the scaffold streaming in the blood of his sovereign, within hearing of the clash of his bayonets which drove out Parliaments with contumely, two successive juries rescued the intrepid satirist* from his fangs, and sent out with defeat and disgrace the usurper's attorney-general from what he had the insolence to call his court! Even then, gentlemen, when all law and liberty were trampled under the feet of a military banditti; when those great crimes were perpetrated on 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 drunkenness of his insolence, to hope to overawe an English jury, I trust and I believe that they would tell him: ご * Lilburne. • Our |