down all personal interests and affections, looks steadily forward to the great ends of public and private justice, unawed by authority, and unbiassed by favour.

It is from thence my hopes for my client revive. If the Universities have lost an advantage, enjoyed contrary to law, and at the expense of sound policy and liberty, you will rejoice that the courts below have pronounced that wise and liberal judgment against them, and will not set the evil example of reversing it here. But you need not therefore forget that the Universities have lost an advantage, and if it be a loss that can be felt by bodies so liberally endowed, it may be repaired to them by the bounty of the Crown, or by your own. It were much better that the people of England should pay ten thousand pounds a year to each of them, than suffer them to enjoy one farthing at the expense of the ruin of a free citizen, or the monopoly of a free trade.*

* According to the seasonable hint at the conclusion of the speech, which perhaps had some weight in the decision of the House to reject the bill, a parliamentary compensation was afterwards made to the Universities, and remains as a monument erected by a British Parliament to a free press.

SPEECH for GEORGE STRATTON, HENRY BROOKE, CHARLES

FLOYER, and GEORGE MACKAY, Esqs. (the Council of Madras), as delivered in the Court of King's Bench, on the 5th February 1780.

THE SUBJECT.

Time now casts into the shade a proceeding which occupied at the moment a great deal of public interest and attention, viz., the arrest and imprisonment of Lord Pigot, Governor of Madras, by the majority of the Council of that settlement, in the year 1776.

On their recall to Europe by the Directors of the East India Company, a motion was made in the House of Commons for their prosecution, by the Attorney-General, for a high misdemeanour.

Admiral Pigot, the brother of Lord Pigot, being at that time a member of the House, and a most amiable man, connected in political life with the Opposition party in Parliament, an extraordinary degree of acrimony arose upon the subject, and the House of Commons came to a resolution to prosecute Messrs Stratton, and others, in the Court of King's Bench; and an information was accordingly filed against them by the Attorney-General. They were defended by Mr Dunning, and the other leading advocates of that time, but were found guilty; and, on their being brought up to receive the judgment of the Court, Mr Erskine, who was then only junior counsel, made the following speech in mitigation of their punishment.

The principle of the mitigation, as maintained by Mr Erskine, may be thus shortly described: Lord Pigot, considering himself, as President of the Government of Madras, to be an integral part of it, independent of the Council, refused to put a question for decision by the Board, which the members of the Council contended it was his duty ministerially to have done; and he also unduly suspended two of them, to make up a majority in favour of his proceedings. This act of Lord Pigot was held by the majority of the Council to be a subversion and usurpation of the government, which they contended was vested in the President and Council, and not in the President only; and to vindicate the powers of the government, thus claimed to reside in them, they caused Lord Pigot to be arrested and suspended, and directed the act of the majority of Council, which Lord Pigot refused to execute, to be carried into execution. It was, of course, admitted that this act was not legally justifiable; that the defendants were properly convicted, and must, therefore, receive some punishment from the Court; but it was contended in the following speech that the Court was bound to

remember and respect the principles which governed our ancestors at the Revolution, and which had dictated so many acts of indemnity by Parliament, when persons, impelled by imminent necessity, had disobeyed the laws.

The defendants were only fined one thousand pounds, without any sentence of imprisonment.

THE SPEECH.

MY LORD,-I really do not know how to ask, or even to expect, the attention of the Court; I am sure it is no gratification to me to try your Lordships' patience on a subject so completely exhausted; I feel, besides, that the array of counsel assembled on this occasion gives an importance and solemnity to the conviction which it little deserves, and carries the air of a painful resistance of an expected punishment, which it would be a libel on the wisdom and justice of the Court to expect.

But in causes that, from their public nature, have attracted the public notice, and in which public prejudices have been industriously propagated and inflamed, it is very natural for the objects of them to feel a pleasure in seeing their actions (if they will bear a naked inspection) repeatedly stripped of the disguise with which the arts of their enemies had covered them, and to expect their counsel to be, as it were, the heralds of their innocence, even after the minds of the judges are convinced. They are apt, likewise, and with some reason, to think that, in this stage of a prosecution, surplusage is less offensive, the degree of punishment not being reducible to a point like a legal justification, but subject to be softened and shaded away by the variety of views in which the same facts may be favourably and justly presented, both to the understanding and the heart. Such feelings, my Lord, which I more than guess are the feelings of my injured clients, must be my apology for adding anything to what my learned leaders have already, I think, unanswerably urged in their favour. It will be, however, unnecessary for me to fatigue your Lordship with a minute recapitulation of the facts; I shall confine myself to the prominent features of the cause.

The defendants are convicted of having assumed to themselves the power of the government of Madras, and with having assaulted and imprisoned Lord Pigot. I say, they are convicted of that, because, although I am aware that the general verdict of guilty includes, likewise, the truth of the first count of the information, which charges the obstruction of Lord Pigot in carrying into execution the specific orders of the Company, yet it is impossible that the general verdict can at all embarrass the Court in pronouncing judgment, it being notorious on the face of the evidence, first, that there were no direct or specific orders of the Company

touching the points which occasioned either the original or final differences, the Rajah of Tanjore being, before the disputes arose, even beyond the letter of the instructions, restored and secured. Secondly, that the instructions, whatever they were, or however to be construed, were not given to the single construction of Lord Pigot, but to him and his Council, like all the other general instructions of that government.

The Company inclined that the Rajah of Tanjore should be restored without infringing the rights of the Nabob of the Carnatic; but how such restoration and security of the Rajah could, or was to be effected without the infringement of those rights of the Nabob which were not to be violated, the Company did not leave to the single discretion of Lord Pigot, but to the determination of the ordinary powers of the government of Fort St George, acting to the best of their understandings, responsible only, like all other magistrates and rulers, for the purity of their intentions

It is not pretended that the Company's instructions directed the Rajah's security to be effected by the residence of a civil chief and council in Tanjore, or by any other civil establishment whatsoever: on the contrary, they disavow such appropriation of any part of the revenues of that country; yet the resisting a civil establishment in the person of Lord Pigot's son-in-law, Mr Russel, destined, too, by the Company for a different and incompatible service, is the specific obstruction which is the burden of the first count of the information, and which is there attempted to be brought forward as an aggravation of the assumption of the general powers of the government; the obstruction of what was not only not ordered by the Company, but of which their orders implied, and in public council were admitted by one of Lord Pigot's adherents to imply, a disapprobation and prohibition.

The claims of Mr Benfield, the subject of so much slanderous declamation without proof, or attempt of proof, and, what is more extraordinary, without even charge or accusation, are subject to the same observations: the orders to restore the Rajah to the possession of his country certainly did not express, and, if my judgment does not mislead me, could not imply, a restitution of the crops sown with the Prince's money, advanced to the inhabitants on the credit of the harvest, without which universal famine would have ensued.

Had the Nabob, indeed, seized upon Tanjore in defiance of the Company, or even without its countenance and protection, he would, no doubt, have been a malá fide possessor, quoad all transactions concerning it with the Company's servants, whatever the justice of his title to it might in reality have been; and the Company's governors, in restoring the Rajah, paying no respect to such usurped possession, would have been justifiable in telling any European who had lent his money on the security of Tanjore

Sir, you have lent your money with your eyes open, to a person, whose title you knew not to be ratified by our approbation, and we cannot, therefore, consider either his claim or yours derived from it. But when the Nabob was put into possession by the Company's troops; when that possession, so obtained, was ratified in Europe, at least, by the silence of the Company, no matter whether wisely or unwisely, justly or unjustly; and, after the Nabob had been publicly congratulated upon such possession, by the King's plenipotentiary in the presence of all the neighbouring princes in India; I confess I am at a loss to discover the absurdity (as it has been called) of the Nabob's pretensions; and it must be remembered, that Mr Benfield's derivative title was not the subject of dispute, but the title of the Nabob, his principal, from whence it was derived; I am, therefore, supported by the report of the evidence, in saying, that it does not appear that the differences in Council arose, were continued, or brought to a crisis, on points where Lord Pigot had the Company's orders, either express or implied, to give any weight to his single opinion beyond the ordinary weight allotted to it by the constitution of the settlement, so as to justify the Court to consider the dissent of the majority from his measures, to be either a criminal resistance of the President, or a disobedience of the Company's specific or general instructions.

Thus perishes the first count of the information, even if it had been matter of charge! But much remains behind. I know it is not enough that the Company's orders were not specific touching any of the points on which the differences arose, or that they were silent touching the property of the crop of Tanjore, or that the Nabob's claim to it had the semblance, or even the reality of justice; I admit that it is not sufficient that the defendants had the largest and most liberal discretion to exercise, if that discretion should appear to have been warped by bad, corrupt, or selfish motives; I am aware, that it would be no argument to say, that the acts charged upon them were done in resistance of Lord Pigot's illegal subversion, if it could be replied upon me, and that reply be supported by evidence, that such subversive acts of Lord Pigot, though neither justifiable nor legal, were in laudable opposition to their corrupt combinations. I freely admit that, if such a case were established against me, I should be obliged to abandon their defence; because I could apply none of the great principles of government to their protection; but, if they are clear of such imputations, then I can and will apply them all.

My Lord, of this bad intention there is no proof; no proof did I say? there is no charge! I cannot reply to slander here. I will not debase the purity of the Court by fighting with the phantoms of prejudice and party, that are invisible to the sedate and sober eye of justice! If it had been a private cause, I would not have suffered my clients, as far as my advice could have influenced, to