the great lights of science and civilisation must be extinguished for men cannot communicate their free thoughts to one another with a lash held over their heads. It is the nature of everything that is great and useful, both in the animate and inanimate world, to be wild and irregular,—and we must be contented to take them with the alloys which belong to them, or live without them.-Genius breaks from the fetters of criticism, but its wanderings are sanctioned by its majesty and wisdom, when it advances in its path;subject it to the critic, and you tame it into dulness.Mighty rivers break down their banks in the winter, sweeping away to death the flocks which are fattened on the soil that they fertilize in the summer: the few may be saved by embankments from drowning, but the flock must perish for hunger. Tempests occasionally shake our dwellings and dissipate our commerce; but they scourge before them the lazy elements, which without them would stagnate into pestilence. In like manner, Liberty herself, the last and best gift of God to his creatures, must be taken just as she is;-you might pare her down into bashful regularity, and shape her into a perfect model of severe scrupulous law, but she would then be Liberty no longer; and you must be content to die under the lash of this inexorable justice which you had exchanged for the banners of Freedom.

If it be asked where the line to this indulgence and impunity is to be drawn; the answer is easy,-The liberty of the press on general subjects comprehends and implies as much strict observance of positive law as is consistent with perfect purity of intention, and equal and useful society; and what that latitude is, cannot be promulgated in the abstract, but must be judged of in the particular instance, and consequently, upon this occasion, must be judged of by you, without forming any possible precedent for any other case; and where can the judgment be possibly so safe as with the members of that society which alone can suffer, if the writing is calculated to do mischief to the public? You must therefore try the book by that criterion, and say, whether the publication was premature and offensive, or, in other words, whether the publisher was bound to have suppressed it until the public ear was anticipated and

abused, and every avenue to the human heart or understanding secured and blocked up?

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, honour, 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 honourable attachments, either in the political or social world, the 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 defence of this person, who is an entire stranger to me;-whose shop I never go to;-and the author of whose publication, as well as 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 examinations, 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, though often forced out of the path by our infir

mities, has been in general well directed; his all-searching eye will assuredly never pursue us into those little corners of our lives, much less will his justice 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 offences 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 tenour 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, chequer 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 for ever.

THE COURT OF KING'S BENCH.
18th December, 1792.

From the speech in defence of Thomas Paine, who was charged with publishing a seditious libel in his Rights of Man. Paine in his book had expressed sympathy with the French Revolution, and in supporting the doctrine of abstract political rights held by the revolutionaries, had demanded reforms in England.

The jury returned a verdict of Guilty.

I have no difficulty in admitting, that if upon an attentive perusal of this work, it shall be found that the Defendant has promulgated any doctrines which excite individuals to withdraw from their subjection to the law by which the whole nation consents to be governed; if his book shall be found to have warranted or excited that unfortunate criminal who appeared here yesterday to endeavour to relieve himself from imprisonment, by the destruction of a prison, or dictated to him the language of defiance which ran through the whole of his defence;if throughout the work there shall be found any syllable or

letter, which strikes at the security of property, or which hints that anything less than the whole nation can constitute the law, or that the law, be it what it may, is not the inexorable rule of action for every individual, I willingly yield him up to the justice of the Court. Gentlemen, I say, in the name of Thomas Paine, and in his words as author of the Rights of Man, as written in the very volume that is charged with seeking the destruction of property, The end of all political associations is, the preservation of the rights of man, which rights are liberty, property, and security; that the nation is the source of all sovereignty derived from it: the right of property being secured and inviolable, no one ought to be deprived of it, except in cases of evident public necessity, legally ascertained, and on condition of a previous just indemnity.'

6

These are undoubtedly the rights of man-the rights for which all governments are established-and the only rights Mr. Paine contends for; but which he thinks (no matter whether right or wrong) are better to be secured by a republican constitution than by the forms of the English Government. He instructs me - He instructs me to admit, that, when government is once constituted, no individuals, without rebellion, can withdraw their obedience from it, that all attempts to excite them to it are highly criminal, for the most obvious reasons of policy and justice, that nothing short of the will of a WHOLE PEOPLE can change or affect the rule by which a nation is to be governed-and that no private opinion, however honestly inimical to the forms or substance of the law, can justify resistance to its authority, while it remains in force.-The author of the Rights of Man not only admits the truth of all this doctrine, but he consents to be convicted, and I also consent for him, unless his work shall be found studiously and painfully to inculcate these great principles of government which it is charged to have been written to destroy.

Let me not, therefore, be suspected to be contending, that it is lawful to write a book pointing out defects in the English government, and exciting individuals to destroy its sanctions, and to refuse obedience.-But, on the other hand, I do contend, that it is lawful to address the English nation

on these momentous subjects; for had it not been for this unalienable right, (thanks be to God and our fathers for establishing it!) how should we have had this constitution which we so loudly boast of ?-If, in the march of the human mind, no man could have gone before the establishments of the time he lived in, how could our establishment, by reiterated changes, have become what it is ?-If no man could have awakened the public mind to errors and abuses in our government, how could it have passed on from stage to stage, through reformation and revolution, so as to have arrived from barbarism to such a pitch of happiness and perfection, that the Attorney General considers it as profanation to touch it further, or to look for any future amendment?

In this manner power has reasoned in every age :government, in its own estimation, has been at all times a system of perfection; but a free press has examined and detected its errors, and the people have from time to time reformed them. This freedom has alone made our government what it is; this freedom alone can preserve it; and therefore, under the banners of that freedom, to-day I stand up to defend Thomas Paine. But how, alas! shall this task be accomplished?-How may I expect from you what human nature has not made man for the performance of?— How am I to address your reasons, or ask them to pause, amidst the torrent of prejudice which has hurried away the public mind on the subject you are to judge?

Was any Englishman ever so brought as a criminal before an English court of justice ?-If I were to ask you, Gentlemen of the Jury, what is the choicest fruit that grows upon the tree of English liberty, you would answer, SECURITY UNDER THE LAW.-If I were to ask the whole people of England, the return they looked for at the hands of Government, for the burdens under which they bend to support it, I should still be answered, SECURITY UNDER THE LAW; or, in other words, an impartial administration of justice. So sacred, therefore, has the freedom of trial been ever held in England;—so anxiously does Justice guard against every possible bias in her path, that if the public mind has been locally agitated upon any subject in judgment, the forum