Public Speaking

lengthy, but from a sense of duty to the prisoners; they who in some sense may be said to have put their lives in my hands; they whose situation was so peculiar that we have necessarily ta

embering that they who are under oath to declare the whole truth think and act very differently from bystande

tandard of truth. To some purposes, you may be said, gentlemen, to be ministers of justice; and "ministers," says a learned judge, "appointed for the ends of public just

of mercy is

the gentle rain

twice

that gives, and

e day shall have subsided; when we shall view things through a different and a much juster medium. It is then we all wish an absolving conscience. May you, gentlemen, now act such a part as will hereafter insure it; s

OF LORD G

ourt of King

THOMAS

ored from the beginning, that you have still kept in your minds the principles to which I entreated you would apply it, and that you have measured it by that standard. You have, therefore, only to look back to the whole of it together; to reflect on all you have heard concerning him; to trace him in your recollection through ever

t by hostile, rebellious force; that, finding himself disappointed in the success of that coercion, he afterward incited his followers to abolish the legal indulgences to Papists, which the object of the petition was to repeal, by the burning o

who relate them to you, in the midst of tumult and confusion-and even those words, mutilated as they are, in direct opposition to, and inconsistent with, repeated and earnest declarations delivered at the very same time and on the very same occasion, related to you by a much greater number of persons, and absolutely incompatible with the whole tenor of his conduct. Which of us all, gentlemen, would be safe, standing

t that, on the contrary, we have been able to resist the probability, I might almost say the possibility of the charge, not only by living witnesses, whom we only ceased to call because the trial would never have ended, but by the evidence of all the blood that has paid the f

ition, believe that such a union of events was something more than natural, and

nor of conduct repels the belief of the traitorous intention charged by the indictment-my task is finished. I shall make no address to your passions. I will not remind you of the long and rigorous imprisonment he has suffered; I will not speak to you of his great youth, of his illustrious birth, and of his uniformly animated

SENTENCE FOR

ALFRE

stly struggle wearied out by her gigantic efforts, and that, at the worst, a general peace would be made which would comprehend a general amnesty and cover up such acts as yours and save you from personal peril. You misjudged your country and failed to appreciate that, though slow to enter into a quarrel, however slow to take up arms, it has yet been her wont that in the quarrel she shall bear herself so that the opposer may beware of her, and that she is seldom so dangerous to her enemies as when the hour of national calamity has raised the dormant energies of her people-knit together every nerve and fiber of the body politic, and has made her sons determined to do all, to sacrifice all on behalf of the country that gave them birth. And against what a Sovereign and what a country did you lift your hand! A Sovereign the best beloved and most deeply honored of all the long line of English Kings and Queens, and whose lamented death was called back to my remembrance only yesterday as a fresh sorrow to many an English household. Against a country which has been the home of progress and freedom, and under whose beneficent sway, whenever you have chosen to stay within her dominions, you have enjoyed a liberty of person, a freedom of speech and action, such as you can have in no other country in Europe, and it is not too much to say in no other country in the world. The only-I will not say excuse, but palliation that I can find for conduct like yours is that it has been for some years past the fashion to treat lightly matters of this kind, so that men have been per

MENT OF AND

s of the Trial in the Un

GE S. B

violated, public justice nowhere respected; and all in consequence of the evil purposes and machinations of the President. Forty millions of people have been rendered anxious and uncertain as to the preservation of public peace and the perpetuity of the institutions of freedom in this country. All classes are oppressed by the private and public calami

s rulers or magistrates, by their example, conduct, policy, and crimes, become the scourge of communities and nations. No picture, no power of the imagination, can illustrate or conceive the suffering of the poor but loyal people of the South. A patr

ents and emotions of justice and virtue, which in human mortal beings are the evidences and the pledge of our Divine origin and immortal destiny, it would heave and throw, with the energy of the elemental forces of nature, and project this enemy of two races of men into that vast region, there forever to exist in a solitude eternal as life, or as the absence of life, emblematical of, if not really, that "outer darkness" of which the Savior of man spoke in warning to those who are the enemies of themselves, of their race, and of their God. But it is yours to relieve

LIAM M

he law, and regard the sole evidence of those facts to be embraced within the testimony of witnesses or documents produced in court, we have made great progress in separating, at least, from your furt

wledge that will not come into play in his arguments. Painfully sensible of my ignorance, being devoted to a profession which "sharpens and does not enlarge the mind," I yet can admire without envy the superior knowledge evinced by the honorable manager. Indeed, upon my soul, I believe he is aware of an astronomical fact which many professors of that science are wholly ignorant of. But never

or taking a penny of his property, or confining his limbs, instant removal from office and transportation to the skies. Truly, this is a great undertaking; and if the learned manager can only get over the obstacles of the laws of nature the Constitution will not stand in his way. He can contrive no method but that of a convulsion of the earth that shall project the deposed President to this infinitely

ast to his broad and strong shoulders, and, having already essayed the flight by imagination, better prepared than anybody else to execute it in form, taking the advantage of ladders as far as ladders will go to the t