at attendance shall be voluntary. Is it possible to doubt what
the consequence will be? All the prisoner's relations and friends will
be in their places to vote for him. Good nature and the fear of making
powerful enemies will keep away many who, if they voted at all, would
be forced by conscience and honour to vote against him. The new system
which you propose would therefore evidently be unfair to the Crown; and
you do not show any reason for believing that the old system has been
found in practice unfair to yourselves. We may confidently affirm that,
even under a government less just and merciful than that under which we
have the happiness to live, an innocent peer has little to fear from
any set of peers that can be brought together in Westminster Hall to
try him. How stands the fact? In what single case has a guiltless head
fallen by the verdict of this packed jury? It would be easy to make out
a long list of squires, merchants, lawyers, surgeons, yeomen, artisans,
ploughmen, whose blood, barbarously shed during the late evil times,
cries for vengeance to heaven. But what single member of your House,
in our days, or in the days of our fathers, or in the days of our
grandfathers, suffered death unjustly by sentence of the Court of
the Lord High Steward? Hundreds of the common people were sent to
the gallows by common juries for the Rye House Plot and the Western
Insurrection. One peer, and one alone, my Lord Delamere, was brought
at that time before the Court of the Lord High Steward; and he was
acquitted. But, it is said, the evidence against him was legally
insufficient. Be it so. So was the evidence against Sidney, against
Cornish, against Alice Lisle; yet it sufficed to destroy them. But,
it is said, the peers before whom my Lord Delamere was brought were
selected with shameless unfairness by King James and by Jeffreys. Be it
so. But this only proves that, under the worst possible King, and under
the worst possible High Steward, a lord tried by lords has a better
chance for life than a commoner who puts himself on his country. We
cannot, therefore, under the mild government which we now possess, feel
much apprehension for the safety of any innocent peer. Would that we
felt as little apprehension for the safety of that government! But it is
notorious that the settlement with which our liberties are inseparably
bound up is attacked at once by foreign and by domestic enemies. We
cannot consent at such a crisis to rel