of my country, to vindicate the national character. I invoke the genius of the constitution. From the tapestry that adorns these walls, the immortal ancestor of this noble lord frowns with indignation at the disgrace of his country. In vain did he defend the liberty, and establish the religion of Britain, against the tyranny of Rome, if these worse than Popish cruelties, and inquisitorial practices, are endured among us. To send forth the merciless cannibal, thirsting for blood! against whom?—your Protestant brethren!—to lay waste their country, to desolate their dwellings, and extirpate their race and name, by the aid and instrumentality of these horrible hounds of war! Spain can no longer boast pre-eminence in barbarity. She armed herself with bloodhounds, to extirpate the wretched natives of Mexico; we, more ruthless, loose these dogs of war against our countrymen in America, endeared to us by every tie that can sanctify humanity. I solemnly call upon your Lordships, and upon every order of men in the state, to stamp upon this infamous procedure, the indelible stigma of the public abhorrence. More particularly, I call upon the holy prelates of our religion, to do away with this iniquity; let them perform a lustration, to purify the country from this deep and deadly sin. My Lords, I am old and weak, and at present unable to say more; but my feelings and indignation were too strong to have said less. I could not have slept this night in my bed, nor even reposed my head upon my pillow, without giving vent to my eternal abhorrence of such enormous and preposterous principles.

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LIBERTY OF THE PRESS.-CURRAN IN DEFENCE OF HAMILTON ROWAN.-JAN. 29, 1794.

GENTLEMEN,-Permit

me to say, that if my client had occasion to defend his cause by any mad or drunken appeals to extravagance or licentiousness, I trust in God I stand in that situation, that, humble as I am, he would not have resorted to me to be his advocate. I was not recommended to his choice by any connection of principle or party, or even private friendship; and saying this, I cannot but add, that I consider not to be acquainted with such a man as Mr. Rowan, a want of personal good fortune. But upon this great subject of reform and emancipation, there is a latitude and boldness of remark, justifiable in the people, and necessary to the defence of Mr. Rowan, for which the habits of professional studies, and technical adherence to established forms, have rendered me unfit. It is, however, my duty, standing here as his advocate, to make some few observations to you, which I conceive to be material. Gentlemen, the interest of the sovereign must be for ever the interest of his people! because his interest lives beyond his life; it must live in his fame; it must live in the tenderness of his solicitude for an unborn posterity; it must live in that heart-attaching bond by which millions of men have united the destinies of themselves and their children with his, and call him by the endearing appellation of KING AND FATHER OF HIS PEOPLE. The people are always strong; the public chains can only be rivetted by the public hands. Look to those devoted regions of southern despotism; behold the

expiring victim on his knees, presenting the javelin, reeking with his blood, to the ferocious monster, who returns it into his heart. Call not that monster the tyrant, he is no more than the executioner of that inhuman tyranny, which the people practice upon themselves, and of which he is only reserved to be a later victim, than the wretch he has sent before him. Look to a nearer country, where the sanguinary characters are more legible; whence you almost hear the groans of death and torture. Do you ascribe the rapine and murder in France, to the few names that we are execrating here? or do you not see that it is the frenzy of an infuriated multitude, abusing its own strength, and practising those hideous abominations on itself? Against the violence of this strength, let your virtue and influence be our safeguard. You are living in a country, where the constitution is rightly stated to be only ten years old; where the people have not the ordinary rudiments of education. It is a melancholy story, that the lower orders of people here, have less means of being enlightened than the same class in any other country. If there be no means left, by which public measures can be canvassed, what then remains ? The liberty of the press only; that sacred palladium, which no influence, no power, no minister, no government,-which nothing but the depravity, or folly, or corruption of a jury, can ever destroy. And what calamities are the people saved from, by having public communication left open to them? I will tell you, gentlemen, what they are saved from, and what the government is saved from; I will tell you, also, to what both are exposed, by shutting up

that communication. In one case, sedition speaks aloud and walks abroad; the demagogue goes forth; the public eye is upon him; he frets his busy hour upon the stage; but soon, either weariness, or bribe, or punishment, or disappointment, bears him down, or drives him off, and he appears no more. In the other case, how does the work of sedition go forward? Night after night the muffled rebel steals forth in the dark, and casts another and another brand upon the pile, to which, when the hour of fatal maturity shall arrive, he will apply the flame. If you doubt of the horrid consequences of suppressing the effusion even of individual discontent, look to those enslaved countries, where the protection of despotism is supposed to be secured by such restraints. Even the person of the despot there is never in safety. Neither the fear of the despot, nor the machinations of the slave, have any slumber; the one anticipating the moment of peril, the other watching the opportunity of aggression. The fatal crisis is equally a surprise upon both; the decisive instant is precipitated without warning, by folly on the one side, or by frenzy on the other, and there is no notice of the treason till the traitor acts. In those unfortunate countries (one cannot read it without horror,) there are officers whose province it is, to have the water which is to be drunk by their rulers, sealed up in bottles, lest some wretched miscreant should throw poison into the draught. In that awful moment of a nation's travail; of the last gasp of tyranny, and the first breath of freedom, how pregnant is the example! The press extinguished, the people enslaved, and the prince undone. As the advocate

of society, therefore, of peace, of domestic liberty, and the lasting union of the two countries, I conjure you to guard the liberty of the press, that great sentinel of the state, that grand detector of public imposture; guard it, because, when it sinks, there sinks with it, in one common grave, the liberty of the subject, and the security of the crown.

EXTRACT FROM LORD ERSKINE'S SPEECH FOR CAPTAIN BAILLIE.-NOV. 24, 1778.

SUCH, my Lords, is the case. The defendant, -not a disappointed malicious informer, prying into official abuses, because without office himself, but himself a man in office ;-not troublesomely inquisitive into other men's departments, but conscientiously correcting his own;-doing it pursuant to the rules of law, and, what heightens his character, doing it at the risk of his office, from which the effrontary of power has already suspended him without proof of his guilt;-a conduct not only unjust and illiberal, but highly disrespectful to this court, whose judges sit in the double capacity of ministers of the law, and governors of this sacred and abused institution. Indeed Lord Sandwiche has, in my opinion, acted such a part

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(Here, Lord Mansfield observing the counsel heated with his subject, and growing personal on the First Lord of the Admiralty, told him that Lord Sandwiche was not before the court.) I know that he is not formally before the court, but, for that very reason, I will bring him before the court he has placed these men in the front of