A. That he walked.

Q. Do you mean to stake your character and your honour before the jury, by saying he was as sober as if you had seen him before dinner?

A. I don't say he was sober.

Q. I ask you, whether you mean to stake your character and your honour before the jury, by saying that he was as sober as at twelve o'clock at day?

A. I should not have known that he was not by his conversation and his walk: whether he was in his right senses when he used those words is another thing.

Q. Do you mean to say he spoke in the manner and the pitch of voice like a sober man?

A. He was stimulated.

Q. He extended his arm?
A. Yes.

Q. You think that a mark of sobriety, do you?

A. I do not think it a mark of good sense.

BULLOCK, of

sworn. Examined by Mr WOOD.

Q. Was you at the Percy Coffee-house on the 6th of November last?

Q. Be so good as tell us whether you heard him say anything, and what it was?

A. I did not attend to the conversation, till I heard what I thought very treasonable words, upon which I committed them to paper: I wrote it at the time, with an idea of having it signed. Q. Be so good as to read it slowly.

A. (Reads.) Percy Coffee-house, 6th of November 1792. We, the undermentioned, do hereby certify, that at about ten o'clock this evening, Mr John Frost came into this coffee-room, and did then, and in our presence, openly declare that he wished to see equality prevail in this country, and no King, in a loud and factious way; and upon being asked whether he meant that there should be no King in this country, he answered, Yes.-That is all I recollect of seditious words.

Lord KENYON. You put this down with a view that they might have been signed?

A. I did.

Mr WOOD. Was Mr Frost drunk or sober at that time? A. I never saw Mr Frost before that time, but he did not appear to me to be a man in liquor, not in the least so.

Q. Have you ever seen him at any other time?

A. I have frequently since.
Q. Where may that be?
A. In Paris.

Q. How soon after this was it?

A. I arrived at Paris on the 27th of December, I think, to the best of my recollection; and I saw him a few days after my arrival there.

Mr ERSKINE. We have surely nothing to do with what passed in Paris?

Lord KENYON. I think I may hear it; if words in this country, constituting a different offence, that might be prosecuted here; but this is quite a new question. In common slander this is always allowed.

Mr ERSKINE. I confess I cannot help entering my protest against it, and upon this plain principle, that it may be recollected that that question did arise, and that the defendant may have the benefit of it.

Mr ATTORNEY-GENERAL, I believe Mr Erskine has misunderstood what I meant by putting the question. I meant merely whether he had ever seen Mr Frost at any future time anywhere, and whether, from any conversation he had with him, he can take upon him to judge of the state in which Mr Frost was upon the 6th of November 1792; that is, comparing his modes of conversing at future times, near or distant, from that 6th of November 1792. I I don't wish to ask a single question respecting Mr Frost's conversation since that time, whatever the law may be upon the subject. I have a still more important reason for not asking it.

Mr ERSKINE. My objection is by no means cured, but still more important. The question was this, Whether the witness shall be allowed to say from conversations with Mr Frost

Mr BULLOCK. I believe I can save you a great deal of trouble. I know nothing about it.

Lord KENYON. I am clearly of opinion that it might have been asked in the way in which the Attorney-General put it,-if by his general deportment afterwards he could judge whether he was in liquor or not? I have not the least particle of doubt.

Mr ERSKINE. Neither have I certainly upon that point, my Lord. Q. Where have you seen him since ?

A. At Calais the first time.

Lord KENYON. I will not have all his life and conversation brought forward. I would not have him give evidence from conjecture or knowledge of what he was doing at Paris. All that I mean to allow is, whether, from his general deportment at other times, he thinks he was sober at that time?

Q. How many times might you see him, think you?

A. It is impossible to say; I have frequently seen him at a coffee-house.

Q. Are you able to judge from that whether he was sober or not when you saw him at Percy Street Coffee-house?

A. He was what you may call a sober man.

Mr ERSKINE. Was he like a man that had been drinking?

A. Drinking moderately.

Q. Two bottles of port,-what do you say to that?

A. I cannot say.

Q. It is very difficult to judge by weights and scales?
A. I thought he was sober by his manner.

SPEECH BY MR ERSKINE.

GENTLEMEN OF THE JURY,-I rise to address you under circumstances so peculiar, that I consider myself entitled, not only for the defendant arraigned before you, but personally for myself, to the utmost indulgence of the Court. I came down this morning with no other notice of the duty cast upon me in this cause, nor any other direction for the premeditation necessary to its performance, than that which I have ever considered to be the safest and the best, namely, the records of the Court, as they are entered here for trial, where, for the ends of justice, the charge must always appear with the most accurate precision, that the accused may know what crime he is called upon to answer, and his counsel how he may defend him. Finding, therefore, upon the record which arraigns the defendant a simple, unqualified charge of seditious words, unconnected and uncomplicated with any extrinsic events, I little imagined that the conduct of my client was to receive its colour and construction from the present state of France, or rather of all Europe, as affecting the condition of England. I little dreamed that the 6th day of November (which, reading the indictment, I had a right to consider like any other day in the calendar) was to turn out an epoch in this country (for so it is styled in the argument), and that, instead of having to deal with idle, thoughtless words, uttered over wine, through the passage of a coffeehouse, with whatever at any time might belong to them, I was to meet a charge of which I had no notice or conception, and to find the loose dialogue, which, even upon the face of the record itself, exhibits nothing more than a casual sudden conversation, exalted to an accusation of the most premeditated, serious, and alarming nature, verging upon high treason itself, by its connexion with the most hostile purposes to the State, and assuming a shape still more interesting from its dangerous connexion with certain mysterious conspiracies, which, in confederacy with French republicans, threaten, it seems, the constitution of our once happy country.

Gentlemen, I confess myself much unprepared for a discussion of this nature, and a little disconcerted at being so; for though (as I have said) I had no notice from the record that the politics of Europe were to be the subject of discourse, yet experience ought to have taught me to expect it; for what act of Government has for a long time past been carried on by any other means ?-when or where has been the debate, or what has been the object of authority, in which the affairs of France have not taken the lead? The affairs of France have, indeed, become the common stalking-horse for all State purposes. I know the honour of my learned friend too well to impute to him the introduction of them for any improper or dishonourable purpose. I am sure he connects them in his own mind with the subject, and thinks them legally before you. I am bound to think so, because the general tenor of his address to you has been manly and candid. But I assert, that neither the actual condition of France, nor the supposed condition of this country, are, or can be, in any shape before you; and that upon the trial of this indictment, supported only by the evidence you have heard, the words must be judged of as if spoken by any man or woman in the kingdom, at any time from the Norman Conquest to the moment I am addressing you.

I admit, indeed, that the particular time in which words are spoken, or acts committed, may most essentially alter their quality and construction, and give to expressions, or conduct, which in another season might have been innocent, or at least indifferent, the highest and most enormous guilt; but for that very reason, the supposed particularity of the present times, as applicable to the matter before you, is absolutely shut out from your consideration -shut out upon the plainest and most obvious principle of justice and law, because, wherever time or occasion mix with an act, affect its quality, and constitute or enhance its criminality, they then become an essential part of the misdemeanour itself, and must consequently be charged as such upon the record. I plainly discover I have his Lordship's assent to this proposition. If, therefore, the Crown had considered this cause originally in the serious light which it considers it to-day, it has wholly mistaken its course. it had considered the Government of France as actively engaged in the encouragement of disaffection to the monarchy of England, and that her newly-erected republic was set up by her as the great type for imitation and example here; if it had considered that numbers, and even classes of our countrymen, were ripe for disaffection, if not for rebellion, and that the defendant, as an emissary of France, had spoken the words with the premeditated design of undermining our Government, this situation of things might and ought to have been put as facts upon the record, and as facts established by evidence, instead of resting, as they do to-day, upon assertion. By such a course, the crime indeed would have become of

If

the magnitude represented; but on the other hand, as the conviction could only have followed from the proof, the defendant, upon the evidence of to-day, must have an hour ago been acquitted, since not a syllable has been proved of any emissaries from France to debauch our monarchical principles; not even an insinuation in evidence that, if there were any such, the defendant was one of them; not a syllable of proof, either directly or indirectly, that the condition of the country, when the words were uttered, differed from its ordinary condition in times of prosperity and peace. It is therefore a new and most compendious mode of justice that the facts which wholly constitute, or at all events lift up the dignity and danger of the offence, should not be charged upon record, because they could not be proved, but are to be taken for granted in the argument, so as to produce the same effect upon the trial, and in the punishment, as if they had been actually charged, and completely established. If the affairs of France, as they are supposed to affect this country, had been introduced without a warrant from the charge or the evidence, I should have been wholly silent concerning them; but as they have been already mixed with the subject in a manner so eloquent and affecting as too probably to have made a strong impression, it becomes my duty to endeavour at least to remove it.

The late revolutions in France have been represented to you as not only ruinous to their authors, and to the inhabitants of that country, but as likely to shake and disturb the principles of this and all other Governments; you have been told that though the English people are generally well affected to their governmentninety-nine out of one hundred, upon Mr Attorney-General's own statement-yet that wicked and designing men have long been labouring to overturn it, and that nothing short of the wise and spirited exertions of the present Government (of which this prose cution is, it seems, one of the instances), have hitherto averted, or can continue to avert, the dangerous contagion which misrule and anarchy are spreading over the world; that bodies of Englishmen, forgetting their duty to their own country and its constitution, have congratulated the Convention of France upon the formation of their monstrous Government; and that the conduct of the defendant must be considered as a part of a deep-laid system of disaffection which threatened the establishments of this king

dom.

Gentlemen, this state of things having no support whatever from any evidence before you, and resting only upon opinion, I have an equal right to mine, having the same means of observation with other people of what passes in the world; and as I have a very clear one upon this subject, I will give it you in a few words.

I am of opinion, then, that there is not the smallest foundation. for the alarm which has been so industriously propagated; in which