of obtaining justice against a guilty peer, however strongly connected.  But you propose that attendance shall be voluntary.  Is it possible to doubt what the consequence will be?  All the prisoner’s relations and friends will be in their places to vote for him.  Good nature and the fear of making powerful enemies will keep away many who, if they voted at all, would be forced by conscience and honour to vote against him.  The new system which you propose would therefore evidently be unfair to the Crown; and you do not show any reason for believing that the old system has been found in practice unfair to yourselves.  We may confidently affirm that, even under a government less just and merciful than that under which we have the happiness to live, an innocent peer has little to fear from any set of peers that can be brought together in Westminster Hall to try him.  How stands the fact?  In what single case has a guiltless head fallen by the verdict of this packed jury?  It would be easy to make out a long list of squires, merchants, lawyers, surgeons, yeomen, artisans, ploughmen, whose blood, barbarously shed during the late evil times, cries for vengeance to heaven.  But what single member of your House, in our days, or in the days of our fathers, or in the days of our grandfathers, suffered death unjustly by sentence of the Court of the Lord High Steward?  Hundreds of the common people were sent to the gallows by common juries for the Rye House Plot and the Western Insurrection.  One peer, and one alone, my Lord Delamere, was brought at that time before the Court of the Lord High Steward; and he was acquitted.  But, it is said, the evidence against him was legally insufficient.  Be it so.  So was the evidence against Sidney, against Cornish, against Alice Lisle; yet it sufficed to destroy them.  But, it is said, the peers before whom my Lord Delamere was brought were selected with shameless unfairness by King James and by Jeffreys.  Be it so.  But this only proves that, under the worst possible King, and under the worst possible High Steward, a lord tried by lords has a better chance for life than a commoner who puts himself on his country.  We cannot, therefore, under the mild government which we now possess, feel much apprehension for the safety of any innocent peer.  Would that we felt as little apprehension for the safety of that government!  But it is notorious that the settlement with which our liberties are inseparably bound up is attacked at once by foreign and by domestic enemies.  We cannot consent at such a crisis to relax the restraints which have, it may well be feared, already proved too feeble to prevent some men of high rank from plotting the ruin of their country.  To sum up the whole, what is asked of us is that we will consent to transfer a certain power from their Majesties to your Lordships.  Our answer is that, at this time, in our opinion, their Majesties have not too much power, and your Lordships have quite power enough.”