affection from my breast. From first to last, I have uniformly pursued the just and virtuous course of conduct; assertor of the honours, of the prerogatives, of the glory of my country; studious to support them, zealous to advance them, my whole being is devoted to this glorious cause. I was never known to march through the city, with a face of joy and exultation, at the success of a foreign power; embracing, and announcing the joyful tiding to those who, I supposed, would transmit it to the proper place. I was never known to receive the successes of my own country, with tremblings, with sighings, with eyes bending to the earth, like those impious men, who are the defamers of the state, as if by such conduct they were not defamers of themselves who look abroad; and, when a foreign potentate hath established his power on the calamities of Greece, applaud the event, and tell us we should take every means to perpetuate his power.

Hear me, ye immortal gods! and let not these their desires be ratified in heaven! Infuse a better spirit into these men! Inspire even their minds with purer sentiments! This is my first prayer-Or if their natures are not to be reformed: on them, on them only discharge your vengeance! Pursue them both by land and sea! Pursue them even to destruction! But, to us display your goodness, in a speedy deliverance from impending evils, and all the blessings of protection and tranquillity!

XXVIII. Speech of Mr. Mackintosh, in defence of M. Peltier, on an information filed by the attorneygeneral for a libel on Napoleon Buonaparte, first consul (now emperor) of France.

PART I.

MY LORD, AND GENTLEMEN OF THE JURY,

I WOULD not so far depart from my duty, or from the respectability of the body to which I belong, as to lend myself to the passions of any client. Whatever respect is due by the law to the rulers of any country, that respect shall be paid by me. Nay more;

whatever concerns liberty, that dearest and best of all the interests of man, may indeed call forth my warm feelings, but I shall know how to repress these feelings in every instance in which they are not born out by truth.

My lord and gentlemen, I have to intreat your indulgence, beset as I am with topics of so much difficulty. You may, indeed, conceive that having had the presumption to encounter those, difficulties, I have no title to indulgence in contending with them. I did not seek them, but having unexpectedly fallen in with them, I will not now turn my back on them: here I found them, and here I will meet and engage them with every exertion of whatever power I possess. Acting on these principles, before an English jury, I am sure that if my feelings shall, in any instance, betray me into any excessive warmth, my client will not suffer for my error. He imposed on me the trust of his defence, and I could not decline it. Still less can I betray it, having once undertaken to charge myself with it. He is entitled to a just, faithful, and fearless defence, and he shall have it, so far as it can be afforded by my humble talents, actuated by a warm and honest zeal in the discharge of my duty. Intrepidity has been so long used at the English bar, that it is unnecessary for me, at this moment, to descant upon it; still less can I claim any merit for acting up to it. I have only to say, that if the bar could have been silenced or overawed by any power whatsoever, no jury would now be here. That pride and boast of our free constitution could not this day have existed. It is owing to the intrepidity of the bar; that you, gentlemen, are now here to try this cause. It was therefore, perhaps, too much for me to say, that my client should have a fearless defence, in a place where fear never entered any bosom, but that of a criminal. Yet, surely, if, in any case, a timid feeling could invade a place so fortified against it, it must be in this, where the prosecutor is the master of a great empire, and the defendant a poor proscribed French emigrant, compelled to relinquish his country, in 1792, driven out by the daggers of his countrymen. Gentlemen, you recollect that eventful and calamitous period, when our shores were covered with helpless women, and children still

more helpless, with priests, strangers to the world, flying from their country, as from a tract overrun with tigers, and seeking in ours a shelter which they did not fail to find. Such of these unhappy fugitives as escaped the scaffold, as survived the trying changes of climates unknown to them, and the multiplied distresses and vexations they had to endure, were recently permitted to revisit their native country. They were indulged in the gratification, and a very high gratification it must be, worn out and exhausted with calamity as they were; they were indulged with permission to die at home. I do not mean to undervalue this indulgence; on the contrary, I am disposed to rate it high; but my client, and a few others, conceived themselves bound, from a feeling of loyalty, which I neither make the subject of commendation or of blame, to refuse to profit by this permission. I do not, as I said, make this refusal a matter of praise or of censure; I only hope that you will not judge too severely of my client, for what he conceives to be a just and honourable devotion to the allegiance under which he was born. Consider, gentlemen, that if we ourselves were, by any unforeseen revolution; I trust, and hope, such an event will never happen; but, if such an event were to place us in a state of dependence and destitution in a foreign land, we should not wish to be judged too unfavourably.-This man, having from his youth devoted himself to literary employments, exerted his talents in the same line here, and produced a variety of works. After the peace, he abstained from all serious politics, and contented himself with the publication of this obscure journal before you, which, if the jealousy of power could ever be at rest, appeared under circumstances the least calculated to give disquiet. It could not be read here, for it was not in the language of the country. It could not be read in France, for we do not understand that the police is supine or negligent in the execution of the prohibition against the admission of periodical papers from England. Under these circumstances, this work was issued for the purpose of amusing and consoling the fellow-sufferers of M. Peltier by occasional reflections on the factions which divide, and the disturbances which agitate the land from which they are exiled. It was intended as a con

solation and amusement to them to whom no consolation now remains, but in contemplating the instability of human affairs, and seeing that those by whom they were expelled were often the victims of fortune as well as they. This was the only journal that dared still to speak in favour of a family once the most august in Europe. This court affords an instance of the instability of human grandeur in that family, and it is not a little remarkable that the last instance of a prosecution by the French government, as cited by my learned friend, was for a libel on that princess who has been since butchered and massacred by her own subjects. I say this not for the purpose of disputing the principle laid down by my learned friend, that no government recog nised by our sovereign is to be libelled with impunity. I agree with him, that in this respect all governments are on the same footing, whether they are governments of yesterday or governments confirmed by a succession of ages. I admit that if lord Clarendon had published some parts of his history at Paris in the year 1656; if the marquis of Montrose had published his sonnets there; if Butler had published his Hudibras; and Cowley those works in which he so ably maintained the cause of his king against the usurper, the president Du Morlaix would have been bound on the complaint of the English ambassador to prosecute them for libels against a government recognised by France. I mention this, that my client may feel the less repugnance at coming into this his last assylum upon earth; and it is, perhaps, owing to his majesty's ministers, that he enjoys even this. If it be so, I owe them my thanks, for their honourable and dignified conduct, in refusing to violate the hospitality due to an unfortunate stranger, who now appears in your presence, as the only place in which his prosecutor and he can be on equal terms. Certainly, circumstanced as he is, the most refreshing prospect which his eye can rest upon, is an English jury, and he feels with me, gratitude to the ruler of empires, that, after the wreck of every thing else, ancient and venerable in Europe, of all established forms and acknow ledged principles, of all long subsisting laws and sacred institutions; we are met here, administering justice after the manner of our forefathers, in this her ancient sanc

tuary. Here then parties come to judgment; one the master of the greatest empire on the earth; and the other, a weak defenceless fugitive, who waves his privilege of having half his jury composed of foreigners, and puts himself, with confidence, upon a jury entirely English.

XXIX. Mr. Mackintosh, in defence of M. Peltier.

PART II.

GENTLEMEN, there is another view in which this case is highly interesting, important, and momentous; and, I confess, I am animated to every exertion that I can make, not more by a sense of my duty to my client, than by a persuasion that this cause is the first of a series of contests with the freedom of the press. My learned friend, I am sure, will never disgrace his magistracy, by being instrumental to a measure so calamitous; but, viewing this as I do, as the first of a series of contests between the greatest power on earth, and the only press that is now free, I cannot help calling on him and you to pause before the great earthquake swallow up all our freedom that remains among men, for though no indication has yet been made of a disposition to attack the freedom of the press in this country, yet the many other countries that have been deprived of this benefit, must forcibly impress us with the propriety of looking vigilantly to ourselves. Holland, Switzerland, and the imperial towns participated with us the benefit of a free press. Holland and Switzerland are now no more, and near fifty of the free imperial towns of Germany have vanished, since the commencement of this prosecution.

They had leisure for observation, and reflection on what was passing around them. They formed a respectable portion of that mass of public opinion, which was the law of powers, who acknowledge no other control. I cannot contemplate a more interesting spectacle than the little republic of Geneva, cultivating literature and science at the gates of the immense empire of Louis XIV. undisturbed and unthreatened. All this is gone;