s in the time of
the Jameses and Charleses perverted the law to the basest of purposes.
I mentioned, amongst others, the work of Twysden and Kelyng and Jones.
This is a case like those. Just now I spoke of the action of Chief
Justice Parker who said it was not for the jury to judge whether a law
_were harsh or not_; I showed how he charged the jury in the case of
Bowen, and how the jury returned a verdict of "not guilty," thus
setting his inhuman charge at nought.[195] But Judge Curtis, for his
law, relies upon Judge Parker's charge. It is not a Statute made by
the legislature that Judge Curtis relies on for his law; it is not a
Custom of the Common law; it is not an Opinion of the Court solemnly
pronounced after mature deliberation; it is only the charge of a
single judge to a jury in a special case, and one which the jury
disregarded even then!

[Footnote 195: See above, p. 112.]

But where did Judge Parker, an estimable man, find his law? Mr. Perez
Morton, the Attorney-General, found it in Kelyng's Reports. In the
case of Bowen only one authority is referred to for that odious
principle on which the judge sought to hang him; that authority is
taken from "9 Charles I.;" from the year 1634--the worst age of the
Stuart tyranny! But even that authority was not a Statute law, not a
Custom of the People, not the Opinion of a Court solemnly pronounced.
It was the charge of a single judge--a charge to a jury, made by an
inferior judge, of an inferior court, in a barbarous age, under a
despotic king! Hearken to this,--from the volume of Kelyng's
Reports.[196] "_Memorandum_, That my Brother Twysden shewed me a
Report which he had of the Charge given by Justice Jones to the
grand-jury at the King's Bench Barr, in Michaelmas Term, 9 Carl. I."
Gentlemen of the Jury, that charge no more settled the law even in
1634, than Judge Sprague's charge telling the _grand-jury to "obey
both"_ the law of God and the law of man which is exactly opposite
thereto, settled the law of the United States and the morality of the
People. But yet that is all the law the government had to hang Bowen
with. The jury made nothing of it.[197]

[Footnote 196: Page 52. See above, p. 112.]

[Footnote 197: Jones's "opinion" relates to a case of _murder_ by the
advice of an absent person, not at all to _suicide by the advice of
another_, so it could not apply to the case of Bowen.]

But Kelyng's Reports are of no value as authority. Here is what Lord
Cam