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We are told that we are in danger; I call upon you, the grea. constitutional saviors of Ireland, to defend the country to which have given political existence, and to use whatever sanction your great name, your sacred character, and the weight you rave in the community, must give you to repress wicked desigrs, if any there are. We feel ourselves strong. The people are always strong; the public chains can only be riveted by the public hands. Look to those devoted regions of southern despotism; behold the expiring victim on his knees, presenting the javelin reeking with his blood to the ferocious monster who returns it into his heart. Call not that monster the tyrant: he is no more than the executioner of that inhuman tyranny, which the people practise upon themselves, and of which he is only reserved to be a later victim than the wretch he has sent before. Look to a nearer country, where the sanguinary characters are more legible; whence you almost hear the groans of death and torture. Do you ascribe the rapine and murder in France to the few names that we are execrating here? or do you not see that it is the frenzy of an infuriated multitude abusing its own strength, and practising those hideous abominations upon itself. Against the violence of this strength, let your virtue and influence be our safeguard.

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What criminality, gentlemen of the jury, can you find in this ? what at any time? but I ask you, peculiarly at this momentous period, what guilt can you find in it? My client saw the scene of horror and blood which covers almost the face of Europe: he feared that causes, which he thought similar, might produce similar effects, and he seeks to avert those dangers by calling the united virtue and tried moderation of the country into a state of strength and vigilance. Yet this is the conduct which the prosecution of this day seeks to punish and stigmatize; and this is the language for which this paper is reprobated to-day, as tending to turn the hearts of the people against their sovereign and inviting them to overturn the constitution.

Gentlemen, let me suggest another observation or two, if still you have any doubt as to the guilt or innocence of the defendan.. Give me leave to suggest to you, what circumstances you ought to consider, in order to found your verdict. You should consider the character of the person accused; and in this your task is easy. I will venture to say, there is not a man in this nation more known than the gentleman who is the subject of this prosecution, not only by the part he has taken in public concerns, and which he has taken in common with many; but still more so by that extraordinary sympathy for human affliction, which, I am sorry to think, he shares with so small a number. There is not a day that you hear the cries of your starving manufacturers in

your streets, that you do not also see the advocate of their sufferings-that you do not see his honest and manly figure with uncovered head, soliciting for their relief; searching the frozen heart of charity, for every string that can be touched by compassion, and urging the force of every argument and every motive save that which his modesty suppresses the authority of his own generous example. Or if you see him not there, you may trace his steps to the private abode of disease, and famine, and despair; the messenger of heaven, bringing with him food, and medicine, and consolation. Are these the materials of which you suppose anarchy and public rapine to be formed? Is this the man, on whom you fasten the abominable charge of goading on a frantic populace to mutiny and bloodshed? Is this the man likely to apostatize from every principle that can bind him to the state; his birth, his property, his education, his character, and his children? Let me tell you, gentlemen of the jury, if you agree with his prosecutors in thinking that there ought to be à sacrifice of such a man, on such an occasion, and upon the credit of such evidence, you are to convict him never did you, never can you give a sentence, consigning any man to public punishment, with less danger to his person or to his fame; for where could the hireling be found to fling contumely or ingratitude at his head, whose private distresses he had not labored to alleviate, or whose public condition he had not labored to improve?

CURRAN ON THE LIBERTY OF THE PRESS.

WHAT then remains? The liberty of the press only; that sacred palladium, which no influence, no power, no minister, no government, which nothing but the depravity, or folly, or corruption of a jury, can ever destroy. And what calamities are the people saved from by having public communication left open to them? I will tell you, gentlemen, what they are saved from, and what the government is saved from! I will tell you also to what both are exposed by shutting up that communication. In one case sedition speaks aloud, and walks abroad; the demagogue goes forth; the public eye is upon him; he frets his busy hour upon the stage; but soon either weariness, or bribe, or punishment, or disappointment bear him down, or drive him off, and he appears no more. In the other case, how does the work of sedition go forward? Night after night the muffled rebel sucals forth in the dark, and casts another and another brand upon the

pile, to which, when the hour of fatal maturity shall arrive, he will apply the flame. If you doubt of the horrid consequences of suppressing the effusion even of individual discontent, look to those enslaved countries where the protection of despotism is supposed to be secured by such restraints. Even the person of the despot there is never in safety. Neither the fears of the despot, nor the machinations of the slave have any slumber, the one anticipating the moment of peril, the other watching the opportunity of aggression. The fatal crisis is equally a surprise upon both; the decisive instant is precipitated without warning by folly on the one side, or by frenzy on the other, and there is no notice of the treason till the traitor acts. In those unfortunate countries (one cannot read it without horror) there are officers, whose province it is to have the water, which is to be drunk by their rulers, sealed up in bottles, lest some wretched miscreant should throw poison into the draught.

But, gentlemen, if you wish for a nearer and more interesting example, you have it in the history of your own revolution; you have it at that memorable period, when the monarch found a servile acquiescence in the ministers of his folly; when the lib erty of the press was trodden under foot; when venal sheriffs returned packed juries to carry into effect those fatal conspiracies of the few against the many; when the devoted benches of public justice were filled by some of those foundlings of fortune, who, overwhelmed in the torrent of corruption at an early period, lay at the bottom like drowned bodies, while soundness or sanity remained in them; but at length, becoming buoyant by putrefaction, they rose as they rotted, and floated to the surface of the polluted stream, where they were drifted along, the object of terror, and contagion, and abomination.

THE SAME, CONTINUED.

IN that awful moment of a nation's travail, of the last gasp of tyranny, and the first breath of freedom, how pregnant is the example? The press extinguished, the people enslaved, and the prince undone. As the advocate of society, therefore, of peace, of domestic liberty, and the lasting union of the two countries, I conjure you to guard the liberty of the press, that great senti nel of the state, that grand detector of public imposture: guard it, because, when it sinks, there sinks with it, in one common grave, the liberty of the subject, and the security of the crowr

There is a sort of aspiring and adventurous credulty, which disdains assenting to obvious truths, and delights in catching a the improbability of circumstances, as its best ground of faith To what other cause, gentlemen, can you ascribe that in the wise, the reflecting, and the philosophic nation of Great Britain, a printer has been gravely found guilty of a libel, for publishing those resolutions to which the present minister of that kingdom had actually subscribed his name? To what other cause can you ascribe, what in my mind is still more astonishing, in such a country as Scotland -a nation cast in the happy medium between the spiritless acquiescence of submissive poverty, and the sturdy credulity of pampered wealth; cool and ardent; adventurous and persevering; winging her eagle flight against the blaze of every science, with an eye that never winks, and a wing that never tires; crowned as she is with the spoils of every art, and decked with the wreath of every muse, from the deep and scrutinizing researches of her Hume, to the sweet and simple, but not less sublime and pathetic morality of her Burnshow, from the bosom of a country like that, genius, and character, and talents should be banished to a distant barbarous soil; condemned to pine under the horrid communion of vulgar vice and base-born profligacy, for twice the period that ordinary calculation gives to the continuance of human life?

CURRAN.

NOBLE DEFENSE OF IRISH CHARACTER.

Ir has been said, too, (and when we were to be calumniated, what has not been said?) that Irishmen are neither fit for freedom or grateful for favors. In the first place, I deny that to be a favor which is a right; and in the next place, I utterly deny that a system of conciliation has ever been adopted with respect to Ireland. Try them, and, my life on it, they will be found grateful. I think I know my countrymen; they cannot help being grateful for a benefit; and there is no country on the earth where one would be conferred with more characteristic benevolence. They are, emphatically, the school-boys of the hearta people of sympathy; their acts spring instinctively from their passions; by nature ardent, by instinct brave, by inheritance generous. The children of impulse, they cannot avoid their virtues; and to be other than noble, they must not only be unnatural but unnational. Put my panegyric to the test. Enter the hovel of the Irish peasant. I do not say you will :ind the

frugality of the Scotch, the comfort of the English, or the fartastic decorations of the French cottager; but I do say, within those wretched bazaars of mud and misery, you will find sensi bility the most affecting, politeness the most natural, hospitality the most grateful, merit the most unconscious; their look is eloquence, their smile is love, their retort is wit, their remark is wisdom not a wisdom borrowed from the dead, but that with which nature herself has inspired them; an acute observance of the passing scene, and a deep insight into the motives of its agent. Try to deceive them, and see with what shrewdness they will detect; try to outwit them, and see with what humor they will elude; attack them with argument, and you will stand amazed at the strength of their expression, the rapidity of their ideas, and the energy of their gesture. In short, God seems to have formed our country like our people; he has thrown round the one its wild, magnificent, decorated rudeness; he has infused into the other the simplicity of genius and the seeds of virtue: he says audibly to us, Give them cultivation."

PHILLIPS.

CURRAN ON IRISH EMANCIPATION.

THIS paper, gentlemen, insists upon the necessity of emancipating the Catholics of Ireland, and that is charged as a part of the libel. If they had waited another year, if they had kept this prosecution impending for another year, how much would remain for a jury to decide upon, I should be at a loss to discover. It seems as if the progress of public information was eating away the ground of the prosecution. Since the commencement of the prosecution, this part of the libel has unluckily received the sanction of the legislature. In that interval our Catholic brethren have obtained that admission, which it seems was a libel to propose; in what way to account for this, I am really at a loss. Have any alarms been occasioned by the emancipation of our Catholic brethren? has the bigoted malignity of any individuals been crushed? or has the stability of the government, or that of the country been weakened? or is one million of subjects stronger than four millions? Do you think that the benefit they receive should be poisoned by the sting of vengeance? If you think so, you must say to them, "You have demanded emancipation and you have got it; but we abhor your persons, we are outraged at your success, and we will stigmatize, by a criminal prosecution, the adviser of that relief which уси have