hereafter have occasion, to say a few words on this subject of merits.  I have said thus much at present in order to remove extraneous impressions from your minds.  For, admitting that your Lordships are the best judges, as I well know that you are, yet I cannot say that you are not men, and that matter of this kind, however irrelevant, may not make an impression upon you.  It does, therefore, become us to take some occasional notice of these supposed services, not in the way of argument, but with a view by one sort of prejudice to destroy another prejudice.  If there is anything in evidence which tends to destroy this plea of merits, we shall recur to that evidence; if there is nothing to destroy it but argument, we shall have recourse to that argument; and if we support that argument by authority and document not in your Lordships’ minutes, I hope it will not be the less considered as good argument because it is so supported.

I must now call your Lordships’ attention from the vaunted services of the prisoner, which have been urged to convict us of ingratitude, to another part of his recriminatory defence.  He says, my Lords, that we have not only oppressed him with unjust charges, (which is a matter for your Lordships to judge, and is now the point at issue between us,) but that, instead of attacking him by fair judicial modes of proceeding, by stating crimes clearly and plainly, and by proving those crimes, and showing their necessary consequences, we have oppressed him with all sorts of foul and abusive language,—­so much so, that every part of our proceeding has, in the eye of the world, more the appearance of private revenge than of public justice.

Against this impudent and calumnious recriminatory accusation, which your Lordships have thought good to suffer him to utter here, at a time, too, when all dignity is in danger of being trodden under foot, we will say nothing by way of defence.  The Commons of Great Britain, my Lords, are a rustic people:  a tone of rusticity is therefore the proper accent of their Managers.  We are not acquainted with the urbanity and politeness of extortion and oppression; nor do we know anything of the sentimental delicacies of bribery and corruption.  We speak the language of truth, and we speak it in the plain, simple terms in which truth ought to be spoken.  Even if we have anything to answer for on this head, we can only answer to the body which we represent and to that body which hears us:  to any others we owe no apology whatever.

The prisoner at your bar admits that the crimes which we charge him with are of that atrocity, that, if brought home to him, he merits death.  Yet, when, in pursuance of our duty, we come to state these crimes with their proper criminatory epithets, when we state in strong and direct terms the circumstances which heighten and aggravate them, when we dwell on the immoral and heinous nature of the acts, and the terrible effects which such acts produce, and when we offer