[One of the jury was a Deist, a professed friend of free speech, and who had said that he never could convict me, but he wanted courage when the hour of the verdict came, and gave in against me. For myself, I never for a moment expected an acquittal. During the few moments of the jury's consultation, I took my watch from my neck and gave it, with my keys, to my friend, Mr. Knight Hunt. My papers I consigned to my friend Mr. W. B. Smith, as for all I knew they might the next moment become the property of the court by virtue of the sentence.]
Mr. Justice Erskine. George Jacob Holyoake, if you had been convicted as the author of that paper which Adams has been convicted of publishing, my sentence must have been very severe. But, although the name is the same, there is no evidence of it.* You have been convicted of uttering language, and although yom have been adducing long arguments to show the impolicy of these prosecutions, you are convicted of having uttered these words with improper levity. The arm of the law is not stretched out to protect the character of the Almighty; we do not assume to be the protectors of our God, but to protect the people from such indecent language. And if these words had been written for deliberate circulation, I should have passed on you a severer sentence. You uttered them in consequence of a question—I have no evidence that this question was put to draw out these words. Proceeding on the evidence that has been given, trusting that these words have been uttered in the heat of the moment, I shall think it sufficient to sentence you to be imprisoned in the Common Gaol for Six calendar months.
* This is another of those unwarranted suppositions in which
the judge ought not to have indulged. 'That paper' was
written by my friend Mr. Chilton, Editor of the Oracle in my
absence, and signed with his initials. The judge might have
known that I was in Gloucester Gaol when it was written and
published. I should have stopped the judge and corrected
him, but I feared by seeming to separate myself from Adams,
to be thought capable of saving myself at his expense, or
exposing him to new rigour.
Mr. Holyoake. My lord, am I to be classed with thieves and felons?
Mr. Justice Erskine. No; thieves and felons are sentenced to the Penitentiary, you to the Common Gaol.
The court adjourned at ten o'clock.
What was advanced by the counsel and the judge has been rendered in full in the foregoing report, but I have contented myself with an abstract of what I urged myself. The Times said I quoted from more than thirty authors, which is very likely; but it was not because I was not sensible of the good taste of brevity that I occupied the bench so long. I was standing that day in court fourteen hours, and, including the cross examinations, I was speaking more than eleven hours. I prepared notes to last me two days; and after the first six hours, my voice, usually shrill and weak, became full and somewhat sonorous. I could have spoken all night, and I should have done it had the judge attempted to put me down. But I willingly acknowledge that, on the whole, the conduct of the judge was fair to me, and patient to a degree that inspired me with great respect for the dignity of the bench, and I dedicated my 'Short and Easy Method with the Saints' to Mr. Justice Erskine, as an actual expression of my respect. The governor of the gaol one day said to me, that I ought not to regret six months' imprisonment after occupying the court and public so many hours. I did not regret it. Indeed, I more deserved the sentence for the length of my defence than for the words for which I was indicted. But it was the menace of the magistrates (before recounted) that I should not be heard, that did me the harm, and exposed me to the imputation of wanting good sense, which is a worse imputation than that of wanting orthodoxy. This came of inexperience in imprisonment. The menaces of magistrates will not so mislead me another time.
When I now read the notices of these proceedings which I furnished to the Oracle at the time, I smile at the juvenility of comment in which I indulged. When similarly-worded reports reach me for the Reasoner, my practice is to extract the simple facts—and, of course, the writers remonstrate with me; but how grateful should I be now if some one had done the same by me then. The principle on which we proceeded with our Oracle was that every man should express himself in his own words and in his own way, and we thought it a crime against freedom to distinguish between weak comment and the report of essential facts, or the expression of vital principle. The report of the proceedings rendered in these pages is given in some measure upon the rule of discrimination which I have described. But, in this, I have been impartial to others, and have omitted many things on the part of my opponents which I believe they would not repeat, and which I, therefore, have no wish to perpetuate. The remaining variations between this report and that which formerly appeared will be found to be partly on the side of greater accuracy in some respects, and more fulness in others. The original report presented most of the quotations, calling them a string of pearls, but left in a very unravelled state the string which tied them—and hence they read like abrupt interpolations. I have now given the connecting observations, the spirit of the extracts, and, in cases where the extracts have not since that time grown familiar to the public ear, I have given them also.
The influence of my defence upon the public at Gloucester and Cheltenham, notwithstanding the difficulties under which I laboured, was in my favour beyond my expectation. The newspapers stated that the court and jury were attentive throughout, and the numbers who thronged the court behaved in the most decorous manner, testifying their interest in the proceedings by a uniform silence, manifesting neither approbation nor disapprobation.' Several newspapers gave nine or ten columns of the proceedings, which was valuable propagandism. And it is due to the Cheltenham Examiner (whose parallel between me and Francis the reader will not have forgotten), to state that it gave an effective rendering of my defence, and added these compensatory words to its report:—'The defendant spoke throughout in a temperate manner, and his defence appeared to tell in his favour, so far as regarded the honesty of his motives.'
Let me say here that my grateful acknowledgments are due to the editor of the Cheltenham Free Press. That paper reported whatever concerned my liberty, my conscience, or my character. It risked much in defending, alone among its local contemporaries, the freedom of speech violated in my person. It opened its columns to Goodwyn Barmby's proclamations, to Catherine Barmby's letters, to Richard Carlile's defences, and to the numerous communications of my friends on my behalf.