l the sun). Good God! shall a
man be prosecuted and pronounced guilty, and consigned to punishment for
affirming that our laws are corrupt; that there is corruption in the
system, and that corruption is an avowed part of that system? when in so
affirming he only echoes the exclamation of the Speaker himself, that
"practices, at which our ancestors would have started with indignation,
were as notorious as the sun at noon-day?" Why, if as the Speaker
declared, such practices exist, and affect the most important branch of
the Legislature, I myself say, that there is corruption in the very
vitals of the Constitution itself. In such a state of things, to talk of
the Constitution, is mockery and insult; and I say there is no
Constitution. What, then, has the writer of this pamphlet said more than
has been avowed by the highest authority, and everybody knows? And now,
can you lay your hands on your hearts, and by your verdict of Guilty send
the defendant to linger in a jail for having published what the author
has, under such circumstances, written?

Having thus concluded my observations on the passages selected from this
paper for prosecution, I will, for I have a right to read it all if I
please, direct your attention to another part of it. Let us examine
whether other passages will not convince us, that (though he should be
mistaken in some of his opinions) the whole was written with a single and
honest intention. I myself never read a paper, which, on the whole,
appeared to be written with more candour. There is an openness that does
not even spare the writer himself. Indeed, with regard to his opinions,
peculiar and mistaken as he may be, he seems himself, sincerely to
believe in them. He is now suffering for those opinions, and suffering
with a firmness, which to those who think him wrong, is stubbornness;
and, thus, he affords another proof of the extreme impolicy of attempting
to impose silence by prosecutions, and extort from the mind the
abjuration of opinions by external and physical force. It never
succeeds; but, on the contrary, works the very opposite effect to that
which is its object. As the author from whom I have just now cited says,
with extreme force and equal beauty, "a kind of maternal feeling is
excited in the mind that makes us love the cause for which we suffer." It
is not for the mere point of expression that it has been said, the blood
of the martyrs is the seed of the church. It is not