he first aggression on me, I might have been what the world terms
honest,--I might have advanced to old age and a peaceful grave through
the harmless cheateries of trade or the honoured falsehoods of a
profession. Nay, I might have supported the laws which I have now
braved; like the counsel opposed to me, I might have grown sleek on the
vices of others, and advanced to honour by my ingenuity in hanging
my fellow-creatures! The canting and prejudging part of the Press has
affected to set before you the merits of 'honest ability,' or 'laborious
trade,' in opposition to my offences. What, I beseech you, are the props
of your 'honest' exertion,--the profits of 'trade'? Are there no bribes
to menials? Is there no adulteration of goods? Are the rich never duped
in the price they pay? Are the poor never wronged in the quality they
receive? Is there honesty in the bread you eat, in a single necessity
which clothes or feeds or warms you? Let those whom the law protects
consider it a protector: when did it ever protect me? When did it ever
protect the poor man? The government of a State, the institutions
of law, profess to provide for all those who 'obey.' Mark! a man
hungers,--do you feed him? He is naked,--do you clothe him? If not, you
break your covenant, you drive him back to the first law of nature, and
you hang him, not because he is guilty, but because you have left him
naked and starving! [A murmur among the mob below, with great difficulty
silenced.] One thing only I will add, and that not to move your
mercy,--no, nor to invest my fate with an idle and momentary
interest,--but because there are some persons in this world who have not
known me as the criminal who stands before you, and whom the tidings of
my fate may hereafter reach; and I would not have those persons view
me in blacker colours than I deserve. Among all the rumours, gentlemen,
that have reached you, through all the tales and fables kindled from my
unhappy notoriety and my approaching doom, I put it to you, if you have
heard that I have committed one sanguinary action or one ruinous and
deliberate fraud. You have heard that I have lived by the plunder of
the rich,--I do not deny the charge. From the grinding of the poor, the
habitual overreaching, or the systematic pilfering of my neighbours, my
conscience is as free as it is from the charge of cruelty and bloodshed.
Those errors I leave to honest mediocrity or virtuous exertion! You
may perhaps find, too,