Mr. Kelly. As this is the first trial under this Act of Parliament, your Lordship will probably consider it proper to reserve the point whether this trading is within the Act.
Mr. Justice Maule. The point has been very fully and ably argued, and I think the Court has given it sufficient consideration. We have no doubt about it; we do not consider it a point on which there is any doubt.
Mr. Kelly. Perhaps the Jury will retire for a few moments before I begin my address.
Mr. Justice Maule. For a few moments, not to exceed a quarter of an hour.
[The Jury retired, and after a short time returned into Court.
Mr. Kelly. May it please your Lordships.
Gentlemen of the Jury,—Their Lordships having determined that this case is fit to be submitted to your consideration, I now proceed to discharge the very anxious, the painfully anxious, duty imposed upon me in consequence, of addressing you on behalf of the prisoner.
Gentlemen, I should ill discharge that duty if I hesitated one moment to denounce this prosecution as one of the most unconscientious prosecutions that ever any individual has dared to bring forward in an English court of justice.
Gentlemen, pardon me if I should express myself in any part of this case with any undue warmth; attribute it to the anxiety I must naturally feel, when I know that all the interests in life, the happiness here—I had almost said hereafter—of the young man at the bar, whose defence is committed to my charge, depend upon your verdict upon this transaction, upon which I, and I only on his behalf, have to address you.
He is a young man, now I believe only seven or eight-and-twenty; he is a foreigner, born in Spain of a Spanish family; he and his ancestors are of that country and not of this, and he has become a member of the mercantile house of which his father is the head. He has, during the latter years of his life, been resident in England, and has from time to time bestowed some attention upon the business of the counting-house and the commercial concerns in which the firm were engaged, and he has participated but as a member of the firm in the ordinary course of business in this transaction, which is, indeed, a very small transaction among many very great and important ones passing through that house; and now, to his consternation, and to his unspeakable astonishment—he, a young man of spotless character—he, who one of the witnesses for the prosecution has already described to you upon his oath as a good son, a good brother, a good father, a good husband, and as an honourable member of society—he finds himself charged here with a felony, and that upon evidence such as I shall have in detail to call your attention to. He is charged with a felony upon which, if from want of ability or from want of caution in his advocate he was to be convicted, he must be transported for fourteen years as a felon, and forfeit his property, and forfeit his character, and be ruined for life.