Gentlemen, I tremble with indignation, to be driven to put such a question in England. Shall it be endured that a subject of this country may be impeached by the Commons for the transactions of twenty years, that the accusation shall spread as wide as the region of letters, that the accused shall stand day after day, and year after year, as a spectacle before the public, which shall be kept in a perpetual state of inflammation against him; yet that he shall not, without the severest penalties, be permitted to submit anything to the judgment of mankind in his defense? If this be law (which is for you to-day to decide), such a man has no trial! That great hall, built by our fathers for English justice, is no longer a court, but an altar; and an Englishman, instead of being judged in it by God and his country, is a victim and a sacrifice!

If you think, gentlemen, that this common duty of self-preservation to the accused himself, which nature writes as a law upon the hearts of even savages and brutes, is nevertheless too high a privilege to be enjoyed by an impeached and suffering Englishman; or if you think it beyond the offices of humanity and justice, when brought home to the hand of a brother or a friend, you will say so by your verdict of guilty; the decision will then be yours; and the consolation mine, that I have labored to avert it. A very small part of the misery which will follow from it is likely to light upon me; the rest will be divided among yourselves and your children.

II. LIBEL NOT DESIGNED

Erskine here sets forth the principles involved in the law of libel. He shows that if the spirit and intention of the author are good, and that it is his design to discuss the measure and not bring contempt upon the government, any hasty or heated single expression should be dealt with indulgently by the courts.

I ask, as counsel for Mr. Stockdale, whether, when a great state criminal is brought for justice at an immense expense to the public, accused of the most oppressive cruelties, and charged with the robbery of princes and the destruction of nations, it is not open to any one to ask, Who are his accusers? What are the sources and

the authorities of these shocking complaints? Where are the ambassadors or memorials of those princes whose revenues he has plundered? Where are the witnesses for those unhappy men in whose persons the rights of humanity have been violated? How deeply buried is the blood of the innocent, that it does not rise up in retributive judgment to confound the guilty! These, surely, are questions which, when a fellow citizen is upon a long, painful, and expensive trial, humanity has a right to propose; which the plain sense of the most unlettered man may be expected to dictate, and which all history must provoke from the more enlightened. When Cicero impeached Verres before the great tribunal of Rome, of similar cruelties and depredations in her provinces, the Roman people were not left to such inquiries. All Sicily surrounded the Forum, demanding justice upon her plunderer and spoiler, with tears and imprecations. It was not by the eloquence of the orator, but by the cries and tears of the miserable, that Cicero prevailed in that illustrious cause. Verres fled from the oaths of his accusers and their witnesses, and not from the voice of Tully. To preserve the fame of his eloquence, he composed his five celebrated speeches, but they were never delivered against the criminal, because he had fled from the city, appalled by the sight of the persecuted and the oppressed. It may be said that the cases of Sicily and India are widely different; perhaps they may be; whether they are or not, is foreign to my purpose. I am not bound to deny the possibility of answers to such questions; I am only vindicating the right to ask them.

Gentlemen, I am ready to admit that his sentiments might have been expressed in language more reserved and guarded; but you will look to the sentiment itself, rather than to its dress to the mind of the writer, and not to the bluntness with which he may happen to express it. It is obviously the language of a warm man, engaged in the honest defense of his friend, and who is brought to what he thinks a just conclusion in argument, which, perhaps, becomes offensive in proportion to its truth. Truth is undoubtedly no warrant for writing what is reproachful of any private man. If a member

of society lives within the law, then, if he offends, it is against God alone, and man has nothing to do with him; and if he transgress the laws, the libeler should arraign himself before them, instead of presuming to try him himself. But as to writings on general subjects, which are not charged as an infringement on the rights of individuals, but as of a seditious tendency, it is far otherwise. When, in the progress either of legislation or of high national justice in Parliament, they who are amenable to no law are supposed to have adopted, through mistake or error, a principle which, if drawn into precedent, might be dangerous to the public, I shall not admit it to be libel in the course of a legal and bona fide publication, to state that such a principle had in fact been adopted. The people of England are not to be kept in the dark touching the proceedings of their own representatives.

An impeachment for an error in judgment is not consistent with the theory or the practice of the English government. I say, without reserve, that an impeachment for an error in judgment is contrary to the whole spirit of English criminal justice, which, though not binding on the House of Commons, ought to be a guide to its proceedings. I say that the extraordinary jurisdiction of impeachment ought never to be assumed to expose error or to scourge misfortune, but to hold up a terrible example to corruption and willful abuse of authority by extra legal pains. If public men are always punished with due severity when the source of their misconduct appears to have been selfishly corrupt and criminal, the public can never suffer when their errors are treated with gentleness. From such protection to the magistrate, no man can think lightly of the charge of magistracy itself, when he sees, by the language of the saving judgment, that the only title to it is an honest and zealous intention. If the people of England were to call upon every man in this impeaching House of Commons who had given. his voice on public questions, or acted in authority, civil or military, to answer for the issues of our councils and our wars, and if honest single intentions for the public service were refused as answers to impeachments, we should have many relations to mourn for, and

many friends to deplore. For my own part, gentlemen, I feel, I hope, for my country as much as any man that inhabits it; but I would rather see it fall, and be buried in its ruins, than lend my voice to wound any minister or other responsible person, however unfortunate, who had fairly followed the lights of his understanding and the dictates of his conscience for their preservation.

Gentlemen, this is no theory of mine; it is the language of English law, and the protection which it affords to every man in office, from the highest to the lowest trust of government. In no one instance that can be named, foreign or domestic, did the Court of King's Bench ever interpose its extraordinary jurisdiction, by information, against any magistrate for the widest departure from the rule of his duty, without the plainest and clearest proof of corruption. God forbid that a magistrate should suffer from any error in judgment, if his purpose was honestly to discharge his trust. We cannot stop the ordinary course of justice; but wherever the court has a discretion, such a magistrate is entitled to its protection. I appeal to the noble judge, and to every man who hears me, for the truth and universality of this position.

III. LIBERTY OF THE PRESS

Erskine shows that there was no desire on the part of the author to vilify Commons. The singleness of his intention was the defense of Hastings. In only two or three selected parts was unfavorable mention made of Commons. Erskine shows the fallacy of holding up these detached sentences as libelous, but concealing the tenor and intent of the book. Under such restraint authors of independence would not venture to write "without an attorney at one elbow and a counsel at the other."

The unhappy people of India, feeble and effeminate as they are from the softness of their climate, and subdued and broken as they have been by the knavery and strength of civilization, still occasionally start up in all the vigor and intelligence of insulted nature. To be governed at all, they must be governed with a rod of iron; and our empire in the East would, long since, have been lost to Great Britain, if civil skill and military prowess had not united their

efforts to support an authority

means which it never can sanction.

which Heaven never gave

- by

Gentlemen, I have not been considering this subject through the cold medium of books, but have been speaking of man and his nature, and of human dominion, from what I have seen of them myself among reluctant nations submitting to our authority. I know what they feel, and how such feelings can alone be repressed. I have heard them in my youth from a naked savage, in the indignant character of a prince surrounded by his subjects, addressing the governor of a British colony, holding a bundle of sticks in his hand, as the notes of his unlettered eloquence. "Who is it," said the jealous ruler over the desert, encroached upon by the restless foot of English adventure "who is it that causes this river to rise in the high mountains and to empty itself into the ocean? Who is it that causes to blow the loud winds of winter, and that calms them again in summer? Who is it that rears up the shade of those lofty forests, and blasts them with the quick lightning at his pleasure? The same Being who gave to you a country on the other side of the waters, and gave ours to us; and by this title we will defend it," said the warrior, throwing down his tomahawk upon the ground and raising the war sound of his nation. These are the feelings of subjugated man all round the globe; and, depend upon it, nothing but fear will control where it is vain to look for affection.

What will they do for you when surrounded by two hundred thousand men with artillery, cavalry, and elephants, calling upon you for their dominions which you have robbed them of? If England, from a lust of ambition and dominion, will insist on maintaining despotic rule over distant and hostile nations, beyond all comparison more numerous and extended than herself, and gives commission to her viceroys to govern them with no other instructions than to preserve them, and to secure permanently their revenues, with what color of consistency or reason can she place herself in the moral chair and affect to be shocked at the execution of her own orders? If you are firmly persuaded of the singleness and purity