gociation at
Chatillon, there would have been such a fall in the price of the funds
that these three persons would have been losers to the amount of upwards
of one hundred and sixty thousand pounds. What will my learned friends
say for persons thus circumstanced, thus involved in suspicion, thus by
falsehood and by moral perjury, though not legal, endeavouring to defend
themselves? Will my learned friends to day call these Smiths? will they
put these persons whom they have made commit this moral perjury into
that box and expose them to the charge of legal perjury? if they do not
put them there they "die and make no sign;" and, if they do I think I
shall be able to shew you who manufactured these affidavits, and how
these servants, the Smiths, have been dealt with. I will undertake to
prove out of their own mouths that their master was from home that night
instead of being as they pretend, in his bed.

But, Gentlemen, when my learned friends find it impossible to stand upon
the ground which their clients have before taken, perhaps they may say,
for in the distress of their case I do not know what may not be
said;--well, admitting that De Berenger was Du Bourg, are we to infer
from his visit to Green-Street that Lord Cochrane and he were thus
criminally connected?--why you must infer the contrary; it is a proof of
innocence, for if they had been so connected, De Berenger would not have
been such a fool as to pay his first visit to Lord Cochrane, he would
have gone to any other house rather than to Lord Cochrane's. Gentlemen,
that argument will not assist my learned friends, for it is too much to
ask credit for rational conduct in those who cannot act criminally
without acting irrationally. They who contrive schemes of fraud cannot
always provide for all possible events. No, Gentlemen, it is the order
of Providence, in mercy to mankind, that wickedness should be defeated
by its own folly. When the mind is in disorder the course is not
straight and even, but irregular and wavering, it is detected by its
obliquity: it is by the winding of the course that you discover you are
in the path of the serpent "_Quem Deus vult perdere prius dementat_," is
a maxim which comes down to us sanctioned by the experience of all ages;
and no man who has not slept for the last two years, can hesitate to set
his seal to its truth. Gentlemen, it is as true of Stock-jobbing
conspirators as it is of those who have lately been entrusted with the
d