jects of human pursuit seem odious and detestable; which has almost made the names of liberty, reformation, and humanity, synonimous with anarchy, robbery, and murder; which thus threatened not to extinguish every principle of improvement, to arrest the progress of civilized society, and to disinheherit future generations of that rich succession, which they were entitled to expect from the knowledge and wisdom of the present, but to destroy the civilisation of Europe, which never gave such a proof of its vigour and robustness, as in being able to resist their destructive power; when all these horrours 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? 66 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, 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 narrations 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 assembly 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 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 of age 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 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 civilisation 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 corrupting his countrymen, a publick 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 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 publick safety of the French Republick!" 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 vengence 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 this country from the dire necessity of inflicting punishment on a brave and virtuous man, becaue he spoke truth of a monster. They would have despised the threats of a foreign tyrant as their ancestors braved the power of oppression 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 with the blood of his sovereign, within hearing of the clash of his bayonets which drove out parliament with contumely, two successive juries rescued the intripid 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 publick veneration, which more than any thing else, 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: "Our ancestors braved the bayonets of Cromwell; we bid defiance to yours. Contempsi Catalinæ gladios-non pertimescam tuos !י What could be such a tyrant's means of overawing a jury? A slong as their country exists, they are girt round with impenetrable armour. Till the destruction of their country no danger can fall upon them for the performance of their duty, and I do trust that there is no Englishman so unworthy of life as to desire to outlive England. But if any of us are condemned to the cruel punishment of surviving our country-if in the inscrutable counsels of Providence, this favoured seat of justice and liberty, this noblest work of human wisdom and virtue, be destined to destruction, which I shall not be charged with national prejudice for * Lilburne. |