enabled to
get rid of this immense amount of Consols and Omnium, without loss,
which, but for the operation of this fraud, they could not have done.

At the trial, Mr. Serjeant Best pressed very eloquently upon your
Lordship and the jury, the former services of Lord Cochrane: I must
observe, my Lord, that those services had neither been forgotten nor
unrewarded by his Sovereign or his Country:--by his Sovereign, he had
been raised to a high rank in his profession, and was in the path to the
highest; he had also been invested with a most honourable personal
distinction, which adds lustre even to nobility itself; which, at the
same time that it was a reward for the past, ought to have been an
incentive for the future:--He had been raised by a grateful Country to
the proud and enviable station of representative in Parliament for the
city in which your Lordships are now sitting; which, at the same time
that it imposed on him the duty of watching, and if necessary, of
animadverting on the conduct of others, especially bound him to guard
the purity of his own. For all this, what return has he made?--he has
engaged in a conspiracy to perpetrate a fraud, by producing an undue
effect on the public funds of the Country, of which funds he was an
appointed guardian, and to perpetrate that fraud by falsehood: He
attempted to palm that falsehood upon that very Board of Government,
under the orders of which he was then fitting out, on an important
public service; and still more, as if to dishonour the profession of
which he was a member, he attempted to make a brother officer the organ
of that falsehood.

This offence, my Lord, does not proceed from the infirmity of a noble
mind, from the impetuosity of youthful passion, from the excess of any
generous feeling;--it is cold, calculating fraud, scarcely capable of
aggravation; but, if it be capable of aggravation, it has received this
great aggravation, that when threatened with detection, he endeavoured
to avert it by the deliberate commission of a crime which, I repeat, has
all the moral turpitude of Perjury, without its legal responsibility. I
have to add one observation only, which applies equally to Lord Cochrane
and Mr. Butt, that they stand before your Lordship, though convicted,
unrepenting.

The Prosecutors in this case have, through many difficulties, conducted
this Prosecution to its termination: they have sought an honourable end
by honourable means: they have sought for