Mr. JUSTICE HARDINGE's address, previous to passing sentence upon MARY MORGAN, convicted of the murder of her bastard child.

"MARY MORGAN-Upon evidence, which leaves not a shade of doubt in the mind, you are convicted of murdering your child, a new-born infant, of your own sex, the offspring of your secret and vicious love; murdering it with a knife, selected as the implement of a purpose deliberately formed, before its destined victim came into the world.

"Your hatred of this innocent little sufferer could not have been your motive. It never offended you, and was therefore no object of resentment. It is true, that if the child had lived, it would have proved your crime in its birth; and your shame would have been the consequence of that proof. But was this a reason to kill and murder it? If its first cries to you, its natural parent, for sustenance and care, made it by force your living accuser, could this be a reason to hush these cries, and stifle that breath, (of the unconscious witness against you) with a knife that nearly severed the head from the neck? Had it lived, you might have lost your place; you might have lost other places; you might have sunk into poverty as well as into shame; but was this a reason to kill an infant? Was it a reason to acquire a false character, with a guilty conscience upon your pillow, and cries of the murdered infant at your ear? When did this fear of shame and poverty begin? Was it an obstacle in the way of your criminal intercourse with your lover? No; when you had criminal passions to indulge, and criminal pleasures to enjoy, you had no fear of the risk. When these passions were satisfied, and these pleasures were accusers in their bitter fruit, then you became such a coward, that you

have sacrificed your infant's life, the peace and interest of your soul, here and hereafter, to that new-born fear. Alas! how dreadful are the landing places of guilt, when it ascends in its progress! You began with incontinencies criminal in itself, but full of complicated peril in its tendency, to worse crimes. Your next guilt was a mark to the world, in the concealment of your pregnancy, which (besides the vicious act of imposture) was dangerous to the child you had conceived. Your last crime was the murder of that child, inflicted by yourself.

"You have murdered that human creature, who of all others upon earth had the most affecting right, as well as claim, to your mercy and your love; the offspring of your own guilt, and guilt entailed upon it in some degree by the shame of its descent. At your wild and youthful age, undisciplined, I fear, as well as unenlightened, and with such early habits, and depraved self-indulgence, it is not possible, that a religion, like that of the New Testament, which breathes in every page of it love to infants, could have been impressed upon your mind.

"But the God of nature has written a book, which he that will may read." You have read that book, and the letters of it were stamped upon your feelings at your birth. It was a law written upon the living and glorious tablets of the heart, which told you, how unjust it was to punish the offspring of your guilt; for the life you had forced upon it by that guilt alone, you should have exerted every moment of your life, in atoning by a redoubled attention to a daughter so born, for the calamity of such a birth. Instead of bracing yourself to this atonement, you were deaf to her infant cries, and you averted the repetition of them with a murdering hand.

"In this choice of difficulties-in this conflict of chances, what is it you have done? You have encountered the peril of detection and punishment, by a death of shame, as the murderer of your child. You have taken

the chance of dying impenitent, or with a conscience illprepared for so awful a change, as from this life into the judgments of eternity. You have taken the chance-had you escaped from human detection-had you imposed upon the world ever so well, of lingering torments upon the rack of a life self-accused, and self-accursed.

"Thus it is that one guilt produces another, especially in your sex, when gendered into its criminal intercourse with ours. The natural delicacy and modesty of the female character intangle all its progressive guilt, and a succession of accumulated crimes regenerated by the fear (if not by the sense) of shame. At last the energies of the mind are half buried in the confusion of shifted expedients to escape from the importunate eye of the world; but there is another eye," about the path, and about the bed," from which no darkness can seclude, and from which " no secrets are hid." That eye never is closed, and brings to light, guilt like your's, in a manner for which the sagacity of human conjecture despairs to ac

count.

"Guilt is always a coward; guilt like your's prompts the offender to accuse himself and prove the crime, by evidence of the fact, in a moment of despair, fear, or surprize. Madness like this comes too late: it is the effect, and the doom of guilt; it is no shelter for it. You have no plea of sudden impulse to this act (not that any such plea could avail you, if in fact it existed); your's was a deliberate murder; the implement of the death's wound obtained, and set apart for its destined object and victim; had you escaped, many other girls (thoughtless and light as you have been) would have been encouraged by that escape to commit your crime, with hopes of your impunity; the merciful turn of your example will save them. Desperate acts like these do often escape from punishment; merciful juries, merciful rules of law, and merciful judges, give numerous occasions to that impunity; if it

be a defect, I hope it will never be repeated: but the same juries, the same law, and the same judges, are firm to their trust in a case like your's. The life you have destroyed, lost its natural parent, when you were its executioner, for guilt of your own. It found a parent in heaven, there is not a more sacred object of that parent's love, (whose children we all of us are,) than a new-born child, created in his image. Its blood is like that of Abel; its cries from the earth, and its complaint is rested in heaven. What your inducement was to sacrifice this pledge of your love, and your crimes, we have no means to ascertain: your conscience knows it well; but we are able to know that it was selfish and cruel.

"I have talked to you hitherto as a judge, preparing and bound by his painful office to inflict the penalty of death upon his convicted prisoner before him; but look. up to me! I can give you comfort, and can tell you, without impairing the weight of your doom in this world, that you can turn away your eyes to the Judge of us all, whose mercy has no limits, and whom no sinner can implore in vain, if the tones of penitence and remorse are deep and sincere. You must have expected your fate; and I hope in God, that you have prepared yourself, by a new made heart, for a better world, having made all the human atonement in your power upon earth. To cut off a young creature like you, in the morning of life's day, (for it is little more than a day to the oldest of us all,) is an affliction thrown upon me, which I have no power to describe, or to bear, so well perhaps as I should. You must not think we are cruel; it is to save other infants like your's, and many other girls like you, from the pit to which you have fallen; your sentence and your death are mercy to them, if you have repented of your impious crime, it is mercy to yourself. Had you escaped, your mind and conscience would, or might have been so depraved, that mercy, winged as it is, could not reach it

in time. You have seen the tears and prayers of all around you prove abhorrence of your crime; we have not lost our compassion for your fate, nor our zealous hope, that you will find mercy at the judgment-seat of a redeeming intercessor, who died for you; that is, who died, that penitent sinners, through him, should be rescued from the doom they had incurred, and should expiate their pollutions in the atonement of his blood.

"I am now to pass upon you the awful sentence of your legal, your just, and your inevitable doom in this world, (then he delivered the sentence in a very impressive manner,) and proceeded thus:

"You have heard the sentence, and the imperious will of the law. It affects your body alone; your soul it cannot reach-it is in the hands of your God. May that fountain of infinite love shew mercy to it, when it shall appear before him, upon the day of its final judgment. May it there be acquitted and blest!"

CHARGE of a Judge to a Jury, on a woman who was accused of murdering her child.

"Gentlemen, if one man had any how slain another, if an adversary had killed his opposer, or a woman occasioned the death of her enemy; even these criminals would have been capitally punished by the Cornelian law; but if this guiltless infant, who could make no enemy, had been murdered by its own nurse, what punishment then had not the mother demanded? With what cries and exclamations would she have stunned your ears! What shall we say then, when a woman, guilty of homicide, a mother of the murder of her innocent child, hath comprised all these misdeeds in one single crime; a crime,