body to enable them to compel a change of government; there is no evidence of their having adopted any of the other purposes in that hand-bill, or of its coming from the mouth of my client, or any person in his company. They took arms on the road, and had conversations about their rights, but they never said they were to work out their rights by force, or to apply their arms but for their own protection. It is supposed they went out in obedience to this proclamation, and in particular the part which relates to the soldiers; and yet you are asked to believe that that party which was to seduce them were the actual aggressors in this hopeless conflict. But what do they do, according to the statement of the other party? They march, avoiding all interference with those whom they want to overthrow, by sneaking along the canal; and when their object is frustrated, they go to a desolate part of the moor, where there was nobody to conquer, but where they go to hide till they could steal back again to the city from which they had come. Does this shew that they had intended to compel a change of government? or is it not referable to the minor offence of going out to escort a body of reformers to what may be called illegal meetings, where seditious speeches were to be made, and absurd, ridiculous, and pernicious resolutions come to? What reason have you to suppose but that they were armed against the police, which had threatened their dispersion; which would have been a riot, but certainly would not have amounted to Treason.

Gentlemen, that is the way they were found; and let us see a little more particularly how this unhappy catastrophe was brought about. They met a person on the road, and one of them asked for his arms; they were not very resolute, for they allowed the man to walk away unhurt in his per

son after a little parley. Then they encounter a hussar; they stop him, and one man asks for his arms: that was stated to you distinctly not to have been the prisoner at the bar; it was stated to be a person who was in the battle, who he thinks escaped, and is not in custody at all. Now, there is no proof of that being done for a common purpose, for another man of the party interposed, and said, You shall not take his arms, and it was carried so; and therefore you are not to attribute the proposed act of one as a common act in which the others are involved, when it appears clearly that they dissented. They have a colloquy with him, and he counterfeits an affection for their principles, and sympathizes with them for those distresses which he sees are the probable cause of their melancholy speculation, which would be ludicrous, if it were not for its example, and the consequences it has brought on its author. The hand-bill is then given to Cook, and word is carried to the troop at Kil syth that armed men are parading the country, and a party is sent out. I do not mean to arraign the conduct of those persons; but I think there is rather scanty evidence to warrant their taking these men prisoners. I have no doubt they acted honourably, and with use to the public; but it was without authority, and all that had been seen were six armed men. I think that was too equivocal to justify a war on the part of the military; but I do not dwell on that. The important thing is, that this troop sought the party, and the party did not mean to seek the troop. It is evident that their object was escape, and the object of the troop was apprehension and seizure. That is pretty manifest from the way in which they came forward; and therefore, Gentlemen, what position were these men placed in, acting, I think, wickedly and foolishly in the

with. I dare say, tedious as my address has been, many matters of importance have been omitted; but I cannot at this time tax my strength or your patience by any recapitulations of the evidence, or any glancing at the heads I should have submitted. I leave this prisoner and this case in your hands; confident that you will require no suggestion of mine, to remember not merely the general deficiency of evidence to which I have alluded repeatedly, but that you cannot forget or be inattentive to the pleadings of that inward advocate, who not only does plead in the hearts of all humane and just and generous men, but whom the law recognises as a legal and weighty advocate, even in questions of strict legal construction, and in all questions, especially where the actual truth of human motives, and the true state of that unsearchable heart, the ways and movements of which can never be completely disclosed to any human eye, are a part of the materials on which a verdict of condemnation or acquittal, in a case of life and death, must depend. The facts are clear and indisputable-I have not disputed them I trust I have not misrepresented them. The whole question is as to the purpose and intention from which those acts proceeded, and which they were intended to accomplish and fulfil, if they had been allowed to be persevered in. This is a question, therefore, as to motives and designs; the determination of which, though difficult, Juries are obliged to undertake; and to which, if they proceed divested of party feelings, and with a merciful inclination towards the accused, I am satisfied they will not go wrong. I say, if along with a zeal for the conscientious discharge of their duty, they take with them those humane and merciful considerations, for the sake of which the establishment of

trial by Jury, and the committal of the life of a fellow-creature to the care of twelve simple and uninstructed men, has been so honoured and admired, the result must be satisfactory to all. To attend to those considerations, Gentlemen, is not only your privilege, but your duty; and it is merely because it is so, that trial by Jury stands so Jury stands so high, and is canonized as the greatest of all blessings, and that without which, the most perfect laws would deviate into harshness and cruelty.

Gentlemen, I cannot but think, that now that the alarm and the immediate danger is over in the country, we shall have a fairer chance than at an earlier period; you will look more to the merciful considerations that may induce you to be satisfied with the exposure already made, and to construe what is equivocal with that favourable leaning and bias towards mercy which the law expects and requires at your hands, and from the consciousness of having exercised which, to your latest days, you will receive more pleasure than if you should act a Roman part, and decide, on a nice point of evidence, to sacrifice these unfortunate individuals, who are already, by a forfeiture of esteem and respect, to be considered as the victims of those deeper and more wicked designers whom the law has not yet. overtaken. I think your feelings will be different, if, in after times, you pass by their dwellings, and instead of meeting with the tearful countenances of their orphans and widows, you there find the men themselves reclaimed from the disaffection with which they may have been tainted, redeemed from that peril on the brink of which they now stand, and enabled, by their reformation, to return to the exercise of an industry which is beginning to be better rewarded, and to bring up their children and their children's chil

dren to admire those Courts and those Juries who have administered the law in mercy, and have acquitted, not indeed from a general imputation of guilt, nor stamping on them any badge or signal of approbation, but merely negativing the precise charge which is before you, and taking advantage of the flexible nature of the charge on which the conviction is demanded, refusing that conviction which might per haps be reasonably granted, but which would be now far more wisely and generously and beneficially withheld. No evidence was called on the part of the defence.

The Solicitor then rose, and after some general observations of the law of Treason, observed :

In the first place, whether there has been assembled an armed multitude-a multitude not armed with all the regularity of well-appointed war -but a multitude deriving confidence from their numbers, and armed in any way with hostile weapons, such as are sufficient in their apprehension to commence that system of operations which constitutes the levying war. The next point, in considering this Treason, is, with what design, for the accomplishment of what purpose, is that multitude assembled, and has that multitude so provided itself with arms?

These are the points to which the learned counsel on the other side has chiefly directed himself; although I could not help thinking, that he shewed much greater dexterity in withdrawing your minds from the proper subject before you, than in giving you much assistance on the law; and for the best of all reasons, because if he had done so, it would have exposed the naked, undisguised, and undisguisable nature of that Treason, which, I am confidently to contend before you, has been brought home, beyond the possibility of doubt, to the prisoner now at the bar.

Upon the first of these points, whe

ther there was here assembled a considerable and a violent multitude, who had provided themselves with arms, who had arrayed themselves in a warlike manner, who had actually proceeded to use those arms in the way which has been so clearly proved to you by a course of evidence that need not be repeated-upon one and all of these points, it is impossible for any human understanding, that has bestowed the slightest attention upon the proceedings which have been detailed in your presence, to entertain the remotest hesitation or doubt. It is a point which has been yielded with great discretion upon the other side; and it is a point upon which I should be ashamed to say one word more to you. Therefore, Gentlemen, you are brought to a short, and as I apprehended it, as clear a point as ever was submitted to the consideration of any Jury; the point is one which is common, not to the charge of Treason only, but to all crimes that can by possibility be brought under the consideration of Courts and Juries. It is brought to this point, what was the design of the parties-with what design did they proceed in the way in which they are proved to have proceeded-was their design an innocent design, a laudable design? Nay, even taking it to be a criminal design, was it one of private import-was it for the vindication of any private right, pecuculiar to any one of the individuals who were there engaged-was it for the satisfaction of any private grudge-was it for the inflicting of any private revenge, that all these proceedings, these blood-thirsty proceedings, were pursued? That is the question which you must lay to your conscience; and I am persuaded, when you give a conscientious attention to the evidence, it is utterly impossible, as I said before, for you, or for any man, to entertain the most remote vestige of doubt.

Gentlemen, it is not necessary that the public design,-supposing I shall

be successful in shewing they had a public design,-it is not necessary that the public design should have been the immediate destruction of the Kingit is not necessary that it should have been to accomplish any particular restraint or invasion of the kingly office; but if the design was one to accomplish a change in the constitution, be it of any description whatever-if it were in the merest trifle in the constitution-if it were to accomplish the slightest alteration in the sacred form of the constitution-and by force, for it was by force, and by nothing else, if the design existed at all,-it brings one and all of them within the sphere and the range, and within the awful penalties of the crime which is now laid to their charge.

Gentlemen, if there had been nothing more in the case but that the armed party, so arrayed and marshalled and prepared, with whom the prisoner was joined, had been found in close and hardy conflict with the troops of his Majesty, I do not scruple to say, that it lay upon them to prove that they were not levying war against his Maiesty. Notwithstanding all that has been said about the presumptions in favour of innocence, presumptions against which, in their fair and legal import, I should be the last person in the world to argue, I say, nevertheless, that persons may be placed in such a situation as to cast upon them the whole burthen of exculpation; it is not necessary that I should plead this case to that degree, but I do not scruple to lay down that proposition as being founded both in reason and in law. Gentlemen, if a man is seen to run another through the body-to blow out his brains, is any thing more to be required of the public prosecutor than the proof of that fact? Is he bound to prove that this murder, as it is in its first appearance, this act of homicide, to call it by an abstract term, is not committed in self. defence, is not committed under the

influence of insanity, or by accident? No such thing. The duty of the public prosecutor is completed by proving the fact of homicide; and that fact being proved, turns over upon the pri soner the whole duty of his own exculpation. Just so, Gentlemen, I apply the principle here. And if a party of men, in regular array of war, are found in conflict with the troops of the King, I say it lies upon them to prove that their purpose was not that which, from necessity, proclaimed by the circumstances in which the parties are found, is the inference which every man must draw from the facts so proved.

It has been earnestly maintained, that the conflict with the King's troops did not constitute Treason, and cannot be stated as an overt act of Treason; and that if there was Treason at all, it must have been completed at some earlier stage of their proceedings. My answer to this view of the case is short, simple, and conclusive. I contend that the Treason was completed before the conflict with the King's troops, of which I need not repeat to you the details. The crime had arrived at its full measure of legal and moral consummation by the assembling in arms. But I

contend further, that their conflict with the Hussars and Yeomanry was nothing more than a natural and necessary continuation of the active proceedings formerly begun; and that the accomplishment of their treasonable design, and their personal safety, were equally involved in the success of that contest.

The Lord President, in summing up, took a general view of the law of Treason, and then exhibited a summary of the evidence, clearly intimating his conviction that the guilt of the prisoners amounted to High Treason. He considered this general view of the law and facts of the case to be the more

necessary, after the eloquent appeal which had been made to their passions,