hostility with each other, yet the
kingdom of guilt is not wholly divided against itself; its subjects are
united by a general interest to elude or overcome that law which would
bring them to condign punishment. Therefore to make a verdict of a Court
of Judicature a necessary condition for enabling men to determine the
quality of an act, when the 'head and front'--the life and soul of the
offence may have been, that it eludes or rises above the reach of all
judicature, is a contradiction which would be too gross to merit notice,
were it not that men willingly suffer their understandings to stagnate.
And hence this rotten bog, rotten and unstable as the crude consistence
of Milton's Chaos, 'smitten' (for I will continue to use the language of
the poet) 'by the petrific mace--and bound with Gorgonian rigour by the
look'--of despotism, is transmuted; and becomes a high-way of adamant
for the sorrowful steps of generation after generation.

Again: in cases where judicial inquiries can be and are instituted, and
are equitably conducted, this suspension of judgment, with respect to
act or agent, is only supposed necessarily to exist in the Court itself;
not in the witnesses, the plaintiffs or accusers, or in the minds even
of the people who may be present. If the contrary supposition were
realized, how could the arraigned person ever have been brought into
Court? What would become of the indignation, the hope, the sorrow, or
the sense of justice, by which the prosecutors, or the people of the
country who pursued or apprehended the presumed criminal, or they who
appear in evidence against him, are actuated? If then this suspension of
judgment, by a law of human nature and a requisite of society, is not
supposed _necessarily_ to exist--except in the minds of the Court; if
this be undeniable in cases where the eye and ear-witnesses are
few;--how much more so in a case like the present; where all, that
constitutes the essence of the act, is avowed by the agents themselves,
and lies bare to the notice of the whole world?--Now it was in the
character of complainants and denunciators, that the petitioners of the
City of London appeared before his Majesty's throne; and they have been
reproached by his Majesty's ministers under the cover of a sophism,
which, if our anxiety to interpret favourably words sanctioned by the
First Magistrate--makes us unwilling to think it a deliberate artifice
meant for the delusion of the people, must how