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den, and the three Innocents into the fiery furnace. Under the same sophistry the bloody edicts of Nero and Caligula were executed. The law must be enforced. Yes, the act imposing the "tea-tax must be executed." This was the

very argument which impelled Lord North and his administration to that mad career which forever separated us from the British crown. Under a similar sophistry, that "religion must be protected," how many massacres have been perpetrated? and how many martyrs have been tied to the stake? What! acting on this vague abstraction, are you prepared to enforce a law without considering whether it be just or unjust, constitutional or unconstitutional? Will you collect money when it is acknowledged that it is not wanted? He who earns the money, who digs it from the earth with the sweat of his brow, has a just title to it against the universe. No one has a right to touch it without his consent except his government, and this only to the extent of its legitimate wants; to take more is robbery, and you propose by this bill to enforce robbery by murder. Yes: to this result you must come, by this miserable sophistry, this vague abstraction of enforcing the law, without a regard to the fact whether the law be just or unjust, constitutional or unconstitutional.

In the same spirit we are told that the Union must be preserved, without regard to the means. And how is it proposed to preserve the Union? By force! Does any man in his senses believe that this beautiful structure-this harmonious aggregate of States, produced by the joint consent of all-can be preserved by force? Its very introduction. will be certain destruction to this Federal Union. No, no. You cannot keep the States united in their constitutional and federal bonds by force. Force may, indeed, hold the

parts together, but such union would be the bond between master and slave-a union of exaction on one side and of unqualified obedience on the other. That obedience which, we are told by the Senator from Pennsylvania, is the Union! Yes, exaction on the side of the master; for this very bill is intended to collect what can be no longer called taxesthe voluntary contribution of a free people-but tributetribute to be collected under the mouths of the cannon! Your custom-house is already transferred to a garrison, and that garrison with its batteries turned, not against the enemy of your country, but on subjects (I will not say citizens), on whom you propose to levy contributions. Has reason fled from our borders? Have we ceased to reflect? It is madness to suppose that the Union can be preserved by force. I tell you plainly that the bill, should it pass, can not be enforced. It will prove only a blot upon your statute-book, a reproach to the year, and a disgrace to the American Senate. I repeat, it will not be executed; it will rouse the dormant spirit of the people, and open their eyes to the approach of despotism. The country has sunk into avarice and political corruption, from which nothing can arouse it but some measure, on the part of the Government, of folly and madness, such as that now under consideration.

DEFENSE OF JOHN STOCKDALE

BY LORD ERSKINE

Gentlemen, I hope I have now performed my duty to my client-I sincerely hope that I have; for, certainly, if ever there was a man pulled the other way by his interests and affections, if ever there was a man who should have trembled at the situation in which I have been placed on

this occasion, it is myself, who not only love, honor, and respect, but whose future hopes and preferments are linked, from free choice, with those who, from the mistakes of the author, are treated with great severity and injustice. These are strong retardments; but I have been urged on to activity by considerations which can never be inconsistent with honorable attachments, either in the political or social worldthe love of justice and of liberty, and a zeal for the Constitution of my country, which is the inheritance of our posterity, of the public, and of the world. These are the motives which have animated me in defense of this person, who is an entire stranger to me; whose shop I never go to; and the author of whose publication-or Mr. Hastings, who is the object of it-I never spoke to in my life.

One word more, gentlemen, and I have done. Every human tribunal ought to take care to administer justice as we look hereafter to have justice administered to ourselves. Upon the principle on which the attorney-general prays sentence upon my client-God have mercy upon us. Instead of standing before Him in judgment with the hopes and consolations of Christians, we must call upon the mountains to cover us; for which of us can present, for omniscient examination, a pure, unspotted, and faultless course? But I humbly expect that the benevolent Author of our being will judge us as I have been pointing out for your example. Holding up the great volume of our lives in His hands, and regarding the general scope of them-if He discovers benevolence, charity, and good will to man beating in the heart, where He alone can look; if He finds that our conduct, tho often forced out of the path by infirmities, has been in general well directed; His all-searching eye will assuredly never pursue us into those little corners of our

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lives; much less will His judgment select them for punishment without the general context of our existence, by which faults may be sometimes found to have grown out of virtues, and very many of our heaviest offenses to have been grafted by human imperfection upon the best and kindest of our affections. No, gentlemen, believe me, this is not the course of divine justice, or there is no truth in the Gospels of Heaven. If the general tenor of a man's conduct be such as I have represented it, he may walk through the shadow of death, with all his faults about him, with as much cheerfulness as in the common paths of life; because he knows that, instead of a stern accuser to expose before the Author of his nature those frail passages which, like the scored matter in the book before you, checker the volume of the brightest and best spent life, His mercy will obscure them from the eye of His purity, and our repentance blot them out forever.

All this would, I admit, be perfectly foreign and irrelevant if you were sitting here in a case of property between man and man, where a strict rule of law must operate, or there would be an end of civil life and society. It would be equally foreign, and still more irrelevant, if applied to those shameful attacks upon private reputation which are the bane and disgrace of the Press; by which whole families have been rendered unhappy during life by aspersions cruel, scandalous, and unjust. Let such libelers remember that no one of my principles of defense can, at any time, or upon any occasion, ever apply to shield them from punishment; because such conduct is not only an infringement of the rights of men, as they are defined by strict law, but is absolutely incompatible with honor, honesty, or mistaken good intentions. On such men let the attorney-general bring

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forth all the artillery of his office, and thanks and blessings of the whole public will follow him. But this is a totally different case. Whatever private calumny may mark this work, it has not been made the subject of complaint, and we have therefore nothing to do with that, nor any right to consider it. We are trying whether the public could have been considered as offended and endangered if Mr. Hastings himself, in whose place the author and publisher have a right to place themselves, had, under all the circumstances which have been considered, composed and published the volume under examination. That question can not, in common sense, be anything resembling a question of law, but is a pure question of fact, to be decided on the principles which I have humbly recommended. I therefore ask of the Court that the book itself may now be delivered to you. Read it with attention, and as you shall find it, pronounce your verdict.

ADDRESS TO THE YOUNG MEN OF ITALY

BY JOSEPH MAZZINI

When I was commissioned by you, young men, to proffer in this temple a few words consecrated to the memory of the brothers Bandiéra, and their fellow martyrs at Cosenza, I thought that some one of those who heard me might, perhaps, exclaim, with noble indignation, "Why thus lament over the dead? The martyrs of liberty are only worthily honored by winning the battle they have begun. Cosenza, the land where they fell, is enslaved; Venice, the city of their birth, is begirt with strangers. Let us emancipate them; and, until that moment, let no words pass our lips,

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