should not have troubled you with any defence at all, because no judgment could have been given on so defective an indictment; for the statute never meant to put an unarmed assembly of citizens on a footing with armed rebellion; and the crime, whatever it is, must always appear on the record to warrant the judgment of the Court.

It is certainly true, that it has been held to be matter of evidence, and dependent on circumstances, what numbers, or species of equipment and order, though not the regular equipment and order of soldiers, shall constitute an army so as to maintain the averment in the indictment of a warlike array; and likewise, what kinds of violence, though not pointed at the King's person, or the existence of the Government, shall be construed to be war against the King. But as it has never yet been maintained in argument in any court of the kingdom, or even speculated upon in theory, that a multitude, without either weapons offensive or defensive of any sort or kind, and yet not supplying the want of them by such acts of violence as multitudes sufficiently great can achieve without them, was a hostile array within the statute;-as it has never been asserted by the wildest adventurer in constructive treason, that a multitude,-armed with nothing,-threatening nothing,-and doing nothing, was an army levying war; I am entitled to say, that the evidence does not support the first charge in the indictment; but that, on the contrary, it is manifestly false;-false in the knowledge of the Crown, which prosecutes it,-false in the knowledge of every man in London who was not bedridden on Friday the 2d of June, and who saw the peaceable demeanour of the Associated Protestants.

But you will hear, no doubt, from the Solicitor-General (for they have saved all their intelligence for the reply) that fury supplies arms-furor arma ministrat;-and the case of Damaree will, I suppose, be referred to, where the people assembled had no banners or arms, but only clubs and bludgeons: yet the ringleader, who led them on to mischief, was adjudged to be guilty of high treason for levying war. This judgment it is not my purpose to impeach, for I have no time for digression to points that do not press upon me. In the case of Damaree, the mob, though not regularly armed, were provided with such weapons as best suited their mischievous designs :-their designs were, besides, open and avowed, and all the mischief was done that could have been accomplished, if they had been in the completest armour. They burnt dissenting meeting-houses protected by law, and Damaree was taken at their head, in flagrante delicto, with a torch in his hand, not only in the very act of destroying one of them, but leading on his followers in person, to the avowed destruction of all the rest. There could therefore be no doubt of his purpose and intention, nor any great doubt that the perpetration of such purpose was, from its generality, high treason, if perpetrated by such a force as distinguishes a felonious riot from a treasonable levying of war. The

principal doubt, therefore, in that case was, whether such an unarmed riotous force was war, within the meaning of the statute; and on that point very learned men have differed; nor shall I attempt to decide between them, because in this one point they all agree. Gentlemen, I beseech you to attend to me here. I say on this point they all agree; that it is the INTENTION of assembling them, which forms the guilt of treason. I will give it you in the words of high authority, the learned Foster; whose private opinions will, no doubt, be pressed upon you as doctrine and law, and which, if taken together, as all opinions ought to be, and not extracted in smuggled sentences to serve a shallow trick, I am contented to consider as authority.

That great judge, immediately after supporting the case of Damaree as a levying war within the statute, against the opinion of Hale in a similar case, viz., the destruction of bawdy-houses, which happened in his time, says, "The true criterion, therefore, seems to be-quo animo did the parties assemble?—with what intention did they meet?"

On that issue, then, by which I am supported by the whole body of the criminal law of England,-concerning which there are no practical precedents of the courts that clash, nor even abstract opinions of the closet that differ,-I come forth with boldness to meet the Crown; for even supposing that peaceable multitude,though not hostilely arrayed, though without one species of weapon among them, though assembled without plot or disguise by a public advertisement, exhorting, nay, commanding peace, and inviting the magistrates to be present to restore it, if broken,though composed of thousands who are now standing around you, unimpeached and unreproved, yet who are all principals in treason, if such assembly was treason; supposing, I say, this multitude to be nevertheless an army within the statute, still the great question would remain behind, on which the guilt or innocence of the accused must singly depend, and which it is your exclusive province to determine-namely, whether they were assembled by my noble client for the traitorous purpose charged in the indictment? For war must not only be levied, but it must be levied against the King in his realm-i.e., either directly against his person to alter the constitution of the Government of which he is the head, or to suppress the laws committed to his execution, BY REBELLIOUS FORCE. You must find that Lord George Gordon assembled these men with that traitorous intention. You must find not merely a riotous illegal petitioning,—not a tumultuous, indecent importunity to influence Parliament,-not the compulsion of motive, from seeing so great a body of people united in sentiment and clamorous supplication,—BUT THE ABSOLUTE, UNEQUIVOCAL COMPULSION OF FORCE

FROM THE HOSTILE ACTS OF NUMBERS UNITED IN REBELLIOUS CONSPIRACY AND ARMS.

This is the issue you are to try; for crimes of all denominations consist wholly in the purpose of the human will producing the act: Actus non facit reum nisi mens sit rea. The act does not stitute guilt, unless the mind be guilty. This is the great text from which the whole moral of penal justice is deduced: it stands at the top of the criminal page throughout all the volumes of our humane and sensible laws; and Lord Chief-Justice Coke, whose chapter on this crime is the most authoritative and masterly of all his valuable works, ends almost every sentence with an emphatical repetition of it.

The indictment must charge an open act, because the 'purpose of the mind, which is the object of trial, can only be known by actions; or, again to use the words of Foster, who has ably and accurately expressed it, "The traitorous purpose is the treason, the overt act, the means made use of to effectuate the intentions of the heart." But why should I borrow the language of Foster, or of any other man, when the language of the indictment itself is lying before our eyes? What does it say? Does it directly charge the overt act as in itself constituting the crime? No. It charges that the prisoner "maliciously and traitorously did compass, imagine, and intend to raise and levy war and rebellion against the King;" this is the malice-prepense of treason; and that to fulfil and bring to effect such traitorous compassings and intentions, he did, on the day mentioned in the indictment, actually assemble them, and levy war and rebellion against the King. Thus the law, which is made to correct and punish the wickedness of the heart, and not the unconscious deeds of the body, goes up to the fountain of human agency, and arraigns the lurking mischief of the soul, dragging it to light by the evidence of open acts. The hostile mind is the crime; and, therefore, unless the matters which are in evidence before you do, beyond all doubt or possibility of error, convince you that the prisoner is a determined traitor in his heart, he is not guilty.

It is the same principle which creates all the various degrees of homicide, from that which is excusable to the malignant guilt of murder. The fact is the same in all; the death of the man is the imputed crime; but the intention makes all the difference; and he who killed him is pronounced a murderer, a single felon, or only an unfortunate man, as the circumstances by which his mind is deciphered to the jury show it to have been cankered by deliberate wickedness or stirred up by sudden passions.

Here an immense multitude was, beyond all doubt, assembled on the 2d of June; but whether HE that assembled them be guilty of high treason, of a high misdemeanour, or only of a breach of the Act of King Charles II. against tumultuous petitioning (if such an Act still exists), depends wholly upon the evidence of his purpose in assembling them, to be gathered by you, and by you alone, from the whole tenor of his conduct; and to be gathered, not by

inference or probability, or reasonable presumption, but in the words of the Act, provably; that is, in the full unerring force of demonstration. You are called upon your oaths to say, not whether Lord George Gordon assembled the multitudes in the place charged in the indictment, for that is not denied; but whether it appears by the facts produced in evidence for the Crown, when confronted with the proofs which we have laid before you, that he assembled them in hostile array, and with a hostile mind, to take the laws into his own hands by main force, and to dissolve the constitution of the Government unless his petition should be listened to by Parliament.

That it is your exclusive province to determine. The Court can only tell you what acts the law, in its general theory, holds to be high treason, on the general assumption that such acts proceed from traitorous purposes: but they must leave it to your decision, and to yours alone, whether the acts proved appear, in the present instance, under all the circumstances, to have arisen from the causes which form the essence of this high crime.

Gentlemen, you have now heard the law of treason: first in the abstract, and secondly as it applies to the general features of the case: and you have heard it with as much sincerity as if I had addressed you upon my oath from the bench where the Judges sit. I declare to you solemnly, in the presence of that great Being at whose bar we must all hereafter appear, that I have used no one art of an advocate, but have acted the plain unaffected part of a Christian man instructing the consciences of his fellow-citizens to do justice. If I have deceived you on the subject, I am myself deceived; and if I am misled through ignorance, my ignorance is incurable, for I have spared no pains to understand it.

I am not stiff in opinions; but before I change any one of those that I have given you to-day, I must see some direct monument of justice that contradicts them: for the law of England pays no respect to theories, however ingenious, or to authors, however wise; and therefore, unless you hear me refuted by a series of direct precedents, and not by vague doctrine, if you wish to sleep in peace, follow me.

And now the most important part of our task begins—namely, the application of the evidence to the doctrines I have laid down; for trial is nothing more than the reference of facts to a certain rule of action, and a long recapitulation of them only serves to distract and perplex the memory, without enlightening the judgment, unless the great standard principle by which they are to be measured is fixed and rooted in the mind. When that is done (which I am confident has been done by you), everything worthy of observation falls naturally into its place, and the result is safe and certain.

Gentlemen, it is already in proof before you (indeed, it is now a

VOL. I.

E

matter of history), that an Act of Parliament passed in the session of 1778, for the repeal of certain restrictions which the policy of our ancestors had imposed upon the Roman Catholic religion, to prevent its extension, and to render its limited toleration harmless; restrictions imposed, not because our ancestors took upon them to pronounce that faith to be offensive to God, but because it was incompatible with good faith to man; being utterly inconsistent with allegiance to a Protestant Government, from their oaths and obligations, to which it gave them not only a release, but a crown of glory as the reward of treachery and treason.

It was indeed with astonishment that I heard the AttorneyGeneral stigmatise those wise regulations of our patriot ancestors with the title of factious and cruel impositions on the consciences and liberties of their fellow-citizens. Gentlemen, they were at the time wise and salutary regulations; regulations to which this country owes its freedom, and His Majesty his crown, a crown which he wears under the strict entail of professing and protecting that religion which they were made to repress; and which I know my noble friend at the bar joins with me, and with all good men, in wishing that he and his posterity may wear for ever.

It is not my purpose to recall to your minds the fatal effects which bigotry has in former days produced in this island. I will not follow the example the Crown has set, me by making an attack on your passions on subjects foreign to the object before you; I will not call your attention from those flames, kindled by a villainous banditti (which they have thought fit, in defiance of evidence, to introduce), by bringing before your eyes the more cruel flames in which the bodies of our expiring, meek, patient, Christian fathers were, little more than a century ago, consuming in Smithfield. I will not call up from the graves of martyrs all the precious holy blood that has been spilt in this land to save its established Government and its reformed religion from the secret villainy and the open force of Papists. The cause does not stand in need even of such honest arts; and I feel my heart too big voluntarily to recite such scenes when I reflect that some of my own, and my best and dearest progenitors, from whom I glory to be descended, ended their innocent lives in prisons and in exile, only because they were Protestants.

Gentlemen, whether the great lights of science and of commerce, which, since those disgraceful times, have illuminated Europe, may, by dispelling these shocking prejudices, have rendered the Papists of this day as safe and trusty subjects as those who conform to the national religion established by law, I shall not take upon me to determine. It is wholly unconnected with the present inquiry. We are not trying a question either of divinity or civil policy; and I shall therefore not enter at all into the motives or merits of the Act that produced the Protestant petition to Parliament. It was cer