Mr. Curran.—"The honorable gentleman says I have poured forth some witticisms of fancy. That is a charge I shall never be able to retort upon him. He says I am insane. For my part were I the man who, when all debate had subsided—who, when the bill was given up, had risen to make an inflammatory speech against my country, I should be obliged to any friend who would excuse my conduct by attributing it to insanity. Were I the man who could commit a murder on the reputation of my country, I should thank the friend who would excuse my conduct by attributing it to insanity. Were I a man possessed of so much arrogance as to set up my own little head against the opinions of the nation, I should thank the friend who would say, 'Heed him not, he is insane!' Nay, if I were such a man, I would thank the friend who had sent me to Bedlam. If I knew one man who was 'easily roused and easily appeased,' I would not give his character as that of the whole nation. The right honorable gentleman says he never came here with written speeches. I never suspected him of it, and I believe there is not a gentleman in the house, who, having heard what has fallen from him, would ever suspect him of writing speeches. But I will not pursue him further. I will not enter into a conflict in which victory can gain no honor."
HIS DEFENCE OF ARCHIBALD HAMILTON ROWAN.
The following extracts, commencing with a description of Mr. Rowan, will be found interesting:
"Gentlemen, let me suggest another observation or two, if still you have any doubt as to the guilt or the innocence of the defendant. Give me leave to suggest to you what circumstances you ought to consider, in order to found your verdict. You should consider the character of the person accused; and in this your task is easy. I will venture to say, there is not a man in this nation more known than the gentleman who is the subject of this persecution, not only by the part he has taken in public concerns, and which he has taken in common with many, but still more so by that extraordinary sympathy for human affliction which, I am sorry to think, he shares with so small a number. There is not a day that you hear the cries of your starving manufacturers in your streets, that you do not also see the advocate of their sufferings—that you do not see his honest and manly figure, with uncovered head soliciting for their relief: searching the frozen heart of charity for every string that can be touched by compassion, and urging the force of every argument and every motive, save that which his modesty suppresses—the authority of his own generous example. Or if you see him not there, you may trace his steps to the abode of disease, and famine, and despair; the messenger of Heaven—bearing with him food, and medicine, and consolation. Are these the materials of which we suppose anarchy and public rapine to be formed? Is this the man on whom to fasten the abominable charge of goading on a frantic populace to mutiny and bloodshed? Is this the man likely to apostatize from every principle that can bind him to the State—his birth, his property, his education, his character, and his children? Let me tell you, gentlemen of the jury, if you agree with his prosecutors in thinking there ought to be a sacrifice of such a man, on such an occasion, and upon the credit of such evidence you are to convict him, never did you, never can you, give a sentence consigning any man to public punishment with less danger to his person or to his fame; for where could the hireling be found to fling contumely or ingratitude at his head whose private distress he had not labored to alleviate, or whose public condition he had not labored to improve?"
Speaking of the liberty of the press, he says—
"What, then, remains? The liberty of the press only; that sacred Palladium, which no influence, no power, no government, which nothing but the folly or the depravity, or the folly or the corruption, of a jury ever can destroy. And what calamities are the people saved from by having public communication kept open to them! I will tell you, gentlemen, what they are saved from; I will tell you also to what both are exposed by shutting up that communication. In one case, sedition speaks aloud and walks abroad; the demagogue goes forth; the public eye is upon him; he frets his busy hour upon the stage; but soon either weariness, or bribe, or punishment, or disappointment, bears him down, or drives him off, and he appears no more. In the other case, how does the work of sedition go forward? Night after night the muffled rebel steals forth in the dark, and casts another brand upon the pile, to which, when the hour of fatal maturity shall arrive, he will apply the flame. If you doubt of the horrid consequences of suppressing the effusion of even individual discontent, look to those enslaved countries where the protection of despotism is supposed to be secured by such restraints. Even the person of the despot there is never in safety. Neither the fears of the despot, nor the machinations of the slave, have any slumber—the one anticipating the moment of peril, the other watching the opportunity of aggression. The fatal crisis is equally a surprise upon both; the decisive instant is precipitated without warning, by folly on the one side, or by frenzy on the other; and there is no notice of the treason till the traitor acts. In those unfortunate countries—one cannot read it without horror—there are officers whose province it is to have the water which is to be drank by their rulers, sealed up in bottles, lest some wretched miscreant should throw poison into the draught. But, gentlemen, if you wish for a nearer and a more interesting example, you have it in the history of your own Revolution; you have it at that memorable period, when the monarch found a servile acquiescence in the ministers of his folly—when the liberty of the press was trodden under foot—when venal sheriff's returned packed juries to carry into effect those fatal conspiracies of the few against the many—when the devoted benches of public justice were filled by some of those foundlings of fortune, who, overwhelmed in the torrent of corruption at an early period, lay at the bottom like drowned bodies while sanity remained in them, but at length, becoming buoyant by putrefaction, they rose as they rotted, and floated to the surface of the polluted stream, where they were drifted along, the objects of terror and contagion and abomination.
"In that awful moment of a nation's travail, of the last gasp of tyranny, and the first breath of freedom, how pregnant is the example! The press extinguished, the people enslaved, and the prince undone! As the advocate of society therefore—of peace, of domestic liberty, and the lasting union of the two countries, I conjure you to guard the liberty of the press, that great sentinel of the State, that grand detector of public imposture: guard it, because when it sinks, there sink with it, in one common grave, the liberty of the subject and the security of the Crown.
"Gentlemen, I am glad that this question has not been brought forward earlier. I rejoice for the sake of the court, the jury, and of the public repose, that this question has not been brought forward till now. In. Great Britain, analogous circumstances have taken place. At the commencement of that unfortunate war which has deluged Europe with blood, the spirit of the English people was tremblingly alive to the terror of French principles; at that moment of general paroxysm, to accuse was to convict. The danger loomed larger to the public eye from the misty region through which it was surveyed. We measure inaccessible heights by the shadows they project, when the lowness and the distance of the light form the length of the shade.
"There is a sort of aspiring and adventurous credulity, which disdains assenting to obvious truths, and delights in catching at the improbabilities of a case as its best ground of faith. To what other cause, gentlemen, can you ascribe that, in the wise, the reflecting, and the philosophic nation of Great Britain, a printer has been gravely found guilty of a libel for publishing those resolutions to which the present minister of that kingdom had already subscribed his name? To what other cause can you ascribe, what in my mind is still more astonishing, in such a country as Scotland—a nation, cast in the happy medium between the spiritless acquiescence of submissive poverty, and the sturdy credulity of pampered wealth—cool and ardent, adventurous and persevering, winging her eagle flight against the blaze of every science, with an eye that never winks, and a wing that never tires; crowned, as she is, with the spoils of every art and decked with the wreath of every muse, from the deep and scrutinizing researches of her Hume, to the sweet and simple, but not less sublime and pathetic, morality of her Burns—how, from the bosom of a country like that, genius and character and talents [Muir, Margarot, &c.,] should be banished to a distant and barbarous soil, condemned to pine under the horrid communion of vulgar vice, and base-born profligacy, twice the period that ordinary calculation gives to the continuance of human life! But I will not further press any idea that is painful to me, and I am sure must be painful to you; I will only say, you have now an example of which neither England nor Scotland had the advantage; you have the example of the panic, the infatuation, and the contrition of both. It is now for you to decide whether you will profit by their experience of idle panic and idle regret, or whether you meanly prefer to palliate a servile imitation of their frailty by a paltry affectation of their repentance. It is now for you to show that you are not carried away by the same hectic delusions, to acts of which no tears can wash away the fatal consequences or the indelible reproach."
He thus speaks of the Volunteers of Ireland:—