suited to a government of violence. It was no compliment to the native clemency of a Cambden, that he sent you into Ireland; and what has been our portion under the change, but massacre and rape, military murders, desolation and terrour?

Had you spared Mr. Orr, you thought, perhaps, the numerous families of those whom your administration had devoted, might accuse you of partiality; and thus to prove your consistency, you are content to be suspected of wanting the only quality this country wishes you to exercise.

But, my lord, it will not do. Though your guards and your soldiers, and your thousands, and your tens of thousands, should conduct innocence to death, it will not do. A voice has cried in the wilderness; and let the deserted streets of Carrickfergus proclaim to all the world, that good men will not be intimidated, and that they are yet more numerous than your soldiers.

We are not Domitian's people; we are not lopped at a blow; but it looks as if some fate had doomed us to be destroyed one by one, as the Persian tyrant ordered the hairs to be plucked from the tail of his beast. Beasts we have been; the vile carriers of the vilest burthens, that the vilest masters could lay upon us. But the yoke is shaken; persecution has provoked to love; and united Ireland against foreign despotism.

Feasting in your castle, in the midst of your myrmidons and bishops, you have little concerned yourself about the expelled and miserable cottager, whose dwelling, at the moment of your mirth, was in flames; his wife and his daughter then under the violation of some commissioned ravager; his son agonizing on the bayonet, and his helpless infants crying in vain for mercy. These are lamentations that stain not the hour of carousal. Under intoxicated counsels, the constitution has reeled to its centre. Justice herself is not only blind drunk, but deaf, like Festus, "to the words of soberness and truth."

My lord, the people of Ireland did hope, that mercy would not have been denied to a most worthy and innocent man, when they understood that one of the worst advisers, and most imperious members of your cabinet, had abandoned the kingdom. Had he been of your late counsels, the odium might have been divided; at present you have the best claim to it. Let, however, the awful execution of Mr. Orr be a lesson to all unthinking juries; and let them cease to flatter themselves that the soberest recommendation of theirs, and of the presiding judge, can stop the course of carnage, which sanguinary, and I do not fear to say, unconstitutional laws, have ordered to be loosed. Let them remember, that, like Macbeth, the servants of the crown have waded so far in blood, that they find it easier to go on than to go back.

MARCUS.

SPEECH, &c.

NEVER did I feel myself so sunk under the importance of any cause. To speak to a question of this kind, at any time, would require the greatest talent and the most matured deliberation; but to be obliged without either of these advantages, to speak to a question that hath so deeply shaken the feelings of this already irritated and agitated nation, is a task that fills me with embarrassment and dismay. Neither my learned colleague nor myself received any instructions or license until after the jury were actually sworn, and we, both of us, came here under an idea that we should not take any part in the trial. This circum

stance I mention, not as an idle apology for an effort, that cannot be the subject of either praise or censure, but as a call upon you, gentlemen of the jury, to supply the defects of my efforts, by a double exertion of your attention.

Perhaps I ought to regret that I cannot begin with any compliment, that may recommend me or my client personally to your favour. A more artful advocate would probably begin his address to you by compliments on your patriotism, and by felicitating his client upon the happy selection of his jury, and upon that unsuspected impartiality in which, if he was innocent, he must be safe. You must be conscious gentlemen, that such idle verbiage as that, could not convey either my sentiments or my client's upon that subject. You know, and we know, upon what occasion you are come, and by whom you have been chosen; you are come to try an accusation professedly brought forward by the state, chosen by a sheriff who is appointed by our accuser.*

Be it so I will not now stop to inquire whose property the city may be considered to be; but the learned gentleman seems to forget, that the election by

* Here Mr. Attorney General said, the sheriff was elected by the city, and that that observation was therefore unfounded.

that city, to whomsoever it may belong, is absolutely void without the approbation of that very lord lieutenant who is the prosecutor in this case. I do therefore repeat, gentlemen, that not a man of you has been called to that box by the voice of my client; that he has had no power to object to a single man among you, though the crown has, and, that you yourselves must feel under what influence you are chosen, or for what qualifications you are particularly selected. At a moment when this wretched land is shaken to its centre by the dreadful conflicts of the different branches of the community; between those who call themselves the partisans of liberty, and those that call themselves the partisans of power; between the advocates of infliction, and the advocates of suffering; upon such a question as the present, and at such a season, can any man be at a loss to guess from what class of character and opinion, a friend to either party would resort for that jury which was to decide between them both. I trust, gentlemen, you know me too well to suppose that I could be capable of treating you with any personal disrespect. I am speaking to you in the honest confidence of your fellow citizen. When I allude to those unworthy imputations of supposed bias, or passion, or partiality, that may have marked you out for your present situation; I do so in order to warn you of the ground on which you stand, of the point of awful responsibility in which you are placed, to your conscience, and to your country; and to remind you, that if you have been put into that box from any unworthy reliance on your complaisance or your servility, you have it in your power, before you leave it, to refute and to punish so vile an expectation by the integrity of your verdict; to remind you, that you have it in your power to show to as many Irishmen as yet linger in their country, that all law and justice have not taken their flight with our prosperity and our peace; that the sanctity of an oath and the honesty of a juror are not yet dead amongst us; and that if our courts of justice are superseded by so ma

ny strange and terrible tribunals, it is not because they are deficient either in wisdom or virtue.

Gentlemen, it is necessary that you should have a clear idea first of the law, by which this question is to be decided secondly, of the nature and object of the prosecution. As to the first, it is my duty to inform you, that the law respecting libels has been much changed of late.-Heretofore, in consequence of some decisions of the judges in Westminster-hall, the jury was conceived to have no province but that of finding the truth of the innuendos and the fact of publication; but the libellous nature of that publication, as well as the guilt or innocence of the publication, were considered as exclusively belonging to the court. In a system like that of law, which reasons logically, no one erroneous principle can be introduced, without producing every other that can be deducible from it. If in the premises of any argument you admit one erroneous proposition, nothing but bad reasoning can save the conclusion from falsehood. So it has been with this encroachment of the court upon the province of the jury with respect to libels. The moment the court assumed as a principle, that they, the court, were to decide upon every thing but the publication; that is, they were to decide upon the question of libel or no libel, and upon the guilt or innocence of the intention, which must form the essence of every crime, the guilt or innocence must of necessity have ceased to be material. You see, gentlemen, clearly, that the question of intention is a mere question of fact. Now the moment the court determined that the jury was not to try that question, it followed of necessity that it was not tried at all; for the court cannot try a question of fact. When the court said that it was not triable, there was no way of fortifying that extraordinary proposition, except by asserting that it was not material. The same erroneous reasoning carried them another step, still more mischievous and unjust: if the intention had

Alluding to the number of courts martial.

been material, it must have been decided upon as a mere fact under all its circumstances. Of these circumstances the meanest understanding can see, that the leading one must be the truth or falsehood of the publication; but having decided the intention to be immaterial, it followed that the truth must be equally immaterial-and under the law so distorted, any man in England who published the most undeniable truth, and with the purest intention, might be punished for a crime in the most ignominious manner, without imposing on the prosecutor the necessity of proving his guilt, or getting any opportunity of showing his innocence.

I am not in the habit of speaking of legal institutions with disrespect: but I am warranted in condemning that usurpation upon the rights of juries, by the authority of that statute, by which your jurisdiction is restored. For that restitution of justice, the British subject is indebted to the splendid exertions of Mr. Fox and Mr. Erskine,-those distinguished supporters of the constitution and of the law; and I am happy to say to you, that though we can claim no share in the glory they have so justly acquired, we have the full benefit of their success: for you are now sitting under a similar act passed in this country, which makes it your duty and your right to decide upon the entire question, upon its broadest grounds, and under all its circumstances, and of course to determine by your verdict, whether this publication be a false and scandalous libel: false in fact, and published with the seditious purpose alleged, of bringing the government into scandal, and instigating the people to insurrection.

Having stated to you, gentlemen, the great and exclusive extent of your jurisdiction, I shall beg leave to suggest to you a distinction that will strike you at first sight; and that is the distinction between publick animadversions upon the character of private individuals, and those which are written upon measures of government, and the persons who conduct them. The former may be called personal, and the