your bar, that a proposition was made to, and adopted by, the Constitutional Society to send a delegate to the Convention at Edinburgh; and you have been desired, from this measure, and others of a similar bearing, to find an intention to destroythe King, from the probable consequence of such proceedings. Let us try the validity of this logic The Society of the Friends of the People (some of whose proceedings are in evidence) had a similar proposition made to them to send a delegate to this same Convention, and the measure was only rejected, after a considerable degree of debate. Suppose, then, on the contrary, they had agreed to send one, and that I, who am now speaking to you, had been of the number who consented, I should then have been in a worse predicament than my Client, who appears to have opposed it; I should have been found to have consented to an act, which, according to some legal casuists, had a tendency to destroy the King; and although my life was laboriously devoted to the duties of my profession, which cut me off from attending to the particular conduct of reformers, though approving of their general and avowed object, Mr. Yorke's speech at Sheffield, and all the matter besides which has consumed our time and patience for three days past, would have been read to establish my conspiracy with people whom I never saw or heard of in the course of my existence. It is, besides, equally high treason to compass and imagine the death of the Heir Ap

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parent, as the death of the King; and if the nature of the conspiracy was to reach the King's life, by subverting the government, its subversion would lead as directly, in its consequence, to the destruc-. tion of his successor, and consequently would, upon the acknowledged principles of law, be a compassing of the death of the Prince of Wales. See, then, to what monstrous conclusions it would lead, if an act could be considered as legally conclusive of an intention, instead of examining it with the eye of reason, and as a fact from the circumstances attending it. It so happened that at this very time, and though a member of this society of reformers, I was Attorney General to the Prince; sworn of bis Privy Council; high in his personal confidence; and full of that affection for him which I yet retain. -Would it have been said, Gentlemen (I am not seeking credit with you for my integrity), but would it have been said without ridicule, that a man, placed as I was in a high situation about the Heir Apparent of the Crown, who had at once the will and the privilege to reward my services; that I, who was serving him at the very moment in terms of confidence and regard, was to be taken conclusively, as a judgment of abstract law, to be plotting his political destruction, and his natural death?

This doctrine, so absurd and irrational, does not appear to me to be supported by any thing like legal authority.

In the first place, let it be recollected that this is

an Indictment on a statute, and not upon the common law, which has the precedents made by Judges for its foundation ;-the rule of action here depends upon a WRITTEN UNALTERABLE record, enacted by the Legislature of the kingdom for the protection of the subject's life, and which the Judges - upon the Bench have no right to transgress or alter a letter of, because other Judges may have done so before them. As far as the law stands upon tradition, it is made by the precedents of Judges, and there is no other evidence of its existence; but A STATUTE is ever present to speak for itself, in all courts, and in all ages; and I say with certaintyspeaking in my own name and person, and desiring to stand or fall as a professional man, by what I utter, that the law is as I maintained it upon the trial of Thomas Hardy, and as I maintain it now. I admit that a statute, like the common law, must receive a judicial interpretation; and that, wherever the letter of an act of Parliament is ambiguous, the constructions which have been first put upon it, if rational, ought to continue to be the rule.-But where a statute is expressed in such plain, unambiguous terms, that but one grammatical or rational construction can be put upon it; when the first departure from that only construction does not appear to have taken its rise from any supposed ambiguity of its expression in the minds of those who first departed from it, which is the general history of constructive departures from written laws, but

comes down tainted with the most degraded profligacy of Judges notoriously devoted to arbitrary and corrupt governments; when the very writers and Judges whose writings and decisions first supported such original misconstructions, honestly admit them to be misconstructions, and lament and reprobate their introduction; when the same lamentation and reprobation of them is handed down from commentator to commentator, and from court to court, through the whole series of constructive judgments; and lastly, when Parliament itself in different ages, as the evil became intolerable, has swept them all away; when, to avoid the introduction of new difficulties, it has cautiously left the old letter of the statute standing to speak for itself, without any other commentary than the destruction of every one that ever had been made upon it, and the reversal of every judgment which ever had departed from its letter, concluding with the positive prohibition, in all future time, of the one and of the other:-in such a case, I do maintain, and, as an English lawyer, feel myself bound for the public safety to declare, in opposition to whatever authorities may be found to the contrary, that if the statute of Edward the Third can be departed from by construction, or can be judged otherwise THAN IF IT HAD PASSED YESTERDAY, there is, properly speaking, no such thing as written law in England.

Gentlemen, you will find me justified in what I say by the language of the statute itself, which is

clear and unambiguous, and by the declarations of its'genuine meaning by subsequent Parliaments.

The words of the statute of the 25th of Edward the Third, are these:

"Whereas divers opinions have been before this "time, in what case treason shall be said, and what "not-the King, at the request of the Lords and "Commons, has made a declaration as hereinafter "followeth :

"When a man doth compass or imagine the "death of our Lord the King-or of our Lady his Queen; or of their eldest son and heir; or if a "man do levy war against THE KING in his realm, or be adherent to the King's enemies in his realm, "giving them aid and comfort, and thereof be "proveably attainted of open deed by people of their "condition."

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The reason of passing it, as expressed by the act itself, and by Lord Hale and Lord Coke in their Commentaries, demonstrates the illegality of any departure from its letter; because it was passed to give certainty to a crime which, by judicial constructions, had before become uncertain. Lord Hale says "that at common law there was a great latitude "used in raising offences to the crime and punish"ment of treason, by way of interpretation, and "arbitrary construction, which brought in great un"certainty and confusion. Thus, accroaching of "royal power was a usual charge of treason an"ciently, though a very uncertain charge; so that