n;
you have it at that memorable period, when the monarch found a servile
acquiescence in the ministers of his folly--when the liberty of the
press was trodden under foot--when venal sheriff's returned packed
juries to carry into effect those fatal conspiracies of the few against
the many--when the devoted benches of public justice were filled by some
of those foundlings of fortune, who, overwhelmed in the torrent of
corruption at an early period, lay at the bottom like drowned bodies
while sanity remained in them, but at length, becoming buoyant by
putrefaction, they rose as they rotted, and floated to the surface of
the polluted stream, where they were drifted along, the objects of
terror and contagion and abomination.

"In that awful moment of a nation's travail, of the last gasp of
tyranny, and the first breath of freedom, how pregnant is the example!
The press extinguished, the people enslaved, and the prince undone! As
the advocate of society therefore--of peace, of domestic liberty, and
the lasting union of the two countries, I conjure you to guard the
liberty of the press, that great sentinel of the State, that grand
detector of public imposture: guard it, because when it sinks, there
sink with it, in one common grave, the liberty of the subject and the
security of the Crown.

"Gentlemen, I am glad that this question has not been brought forward
earlier. I rejoice for the sake of the court, the jury, and of the
public repose, that this question has not been brought forward till now.
In. Great Britain, analogous circumstances have taken place. At the
commencement of that unfortunate war which has deluged Europe with
blood, the spirit of the English people was tremblingly alive to the
terror of French principles; at that moment of general paroxysm, to
accuse was to convict. The danger loomed larger to the public eye from
the misty region through which it was surveyed. We measure inaccessible
heights by the shadows they project, when the lowness and the distance
of the light form the length of the shade.

"There is a sort of aspiring and adventurous credulity, which disdains
assenting to obvious truths, and delights in catching at the
improbabilities of a case as its best ground of faith. To what other
cause, gentlemen, can you ascribe that, in the wise, the reflecting, and
the philosophic nation of Great Britain, a printer has been gravely
found guilty of a libel for publishing those resolutions to which the
p