liaments are beyond all question agreeable to the ancient prac tice of this country. Whether there ever was a law with regard to them, I shall not here pretend to determine. In point of fact, for many centuries, there were scarcely any others; and, upon the whole, I have no doubt there have been more annual Parliaments held in Great Britain, than Parliaments of a longer duration. Those who admire our ancestors and remote times more than I do, (for I think, as to liberty, we are better off now than ever we were), may wish to have recourse to annual Parliaments, and this desire may be innocent and laudable. Universal suffrage, again, is agreeable to the theory of the Constitution. There can be no doubt about that; and a greater approximation in practice to the theory of the Constitution than what at present exists might per haps be desirable. In all the books on the English Constitution, the principle is to be found. But here, again, to be sure, the theory and practice are disjoined. There never was any thing like what is now meant by universal suffrage established in these lands: for if we look to history, we shall find that the great body of the people were formerly in a state of villainage under the Aristocracy. Universal suffrage, however, is agreeable to the theory of the Constitution. According to constitutional doctrine, every man has a representative in Parliament. I might read a great variety of passages from Montesquieu and others, from which it is quite clear that they regarded this principle, that the people have a right to be represented in Parliament, as the foundation of our liberties. Now, the fact is well known, that some pla ces are not directly represented at all,-that some large towns choose no representatives, and that there are representatives, on the other hand, who have no constituents. Now, it ap pears that the petitioners thought this wrong, and desired to introduce a practice a little more analogous to the theory of the Constitution, which certainly was no great crime in them, whatever may be thought of the expediency of their views.

This brings me to some leading statements in the address of the Public Prosecutor. He says you may attack the Ministers, but not the Constitution. You must not deny that the King, Lords and Commons, are each of them, as now existing, the legal depositaries of the degree of power given to them; but you may attack the Ministers as much as you please. We are beholden to him, at all events, for the concession; but let us see what this distinction points at,--what it means. Does my friend mean that the people shall not petition against, shall not complain of, any grievance which

consists in a bad arrangement of any great branch of the Legislature, any class or order in the Constitution,-in perhaps a new grouping, or a mischievous alteration of any thing in the constitution of the legislative body? What! Is it not competent to petition against the septennial law? Was it not lawful to petition for its adoption? I think the ministry of that day would scarcely have treated such an application as seditious; yet it made just as great a change in the Constitution, as the adoption of annual parliaments would do now. Direct acts of Parliament make changes in such matters every day; but from what do they originate? Not surely from the arbitrary will of Government, but from the sentiments of the nation. I never heard such acts defended as being measures of Government, but as being conformable to wisdom, good sense, and propriety. The law establishing the inability of excisemen to vote at elections,-laws relative to residence of voters,-all these, and many other arrangements touching the constitution of the Legislature, have been made from time to time, and a great many have recently been made. Is it to be said that the people are to have no voice regarding such matters? that they may petition and interfere as to the imposition of taxes, but not as to the reformation or improvement of the body by which they are imposed? I entirely deny the existence of any such distinction. The right of petition unquestionably extends to every thing that is within the competence of the Legislature to grant. It is not within the power of the Legislature to abolish Christianity, or the House of Lords, or any of the branches of the Legislature. But, with regard to every measure which may constitutionally originate with Government, the people may humbly petition, pointing out such reasons as appear to them to recommend or to oppose its adoption. This is the people's right. To meet for this purpose is lawful, and there is no reason for restraining them in their deliberations on such occasions. Over the great legislative body they have thus had a continual, uniform, and a progressive control, from the first dawn of freedom in the country down to the present time.

In the exercise of this control, they are not circumscribed to any particular class of topics, but may expatiate freely through every branch of our laws and policy. There are a great many authorities which I need not read to shew, that propositions may on such occasions be maintained, the very mention of which has been erroneously supposed by the Prosecutor to infer blame. The pannels are alleged to have said they were entitled to break out into open rebellion if they did not obtain universal suffrage and annual parliaments. I have not

discovered that they said this. I hope they will not obtain either of these objects; but it is competent for persons who think differently from me with regard to them to ask for them, and to state their reasons for doing so. That they are entitled to be heard, I maintain loudly and unequivocally in opposition to all assertions to the contrary,-assertions which would go to subvert the foundation, and extinguish the vi tal principles of our Constitution.

But it is said that the words used here admit of no defence. It is your province, and yours only, to judge of the import of these words, and of the intentions of the persons who used them. I will not go over them all. One observation, however, it is quite indispensable to make, and that is, that you are not to form an opinion upon the import of the passages quoted in the Indictment, without listening to and pondering by yourselves all the other passages in the same paper. It has never been a rule in trying a case of sedition, that a single sentence is to be judged of by itself; and you are not entitled to proceed on that sentence as indicating the seditious character of the whole production, if, in point of fact, the great bulk and general character of the statement give the lie to the charge.

You are told that the expressions charged against the pannels are seditious and inflammatory. I believe that some of the expressions are extremely absurd, and exceedingly improper, nay grossly indecent. But I maintain, that looking at them either by themselves, or in context with the other passages in the publication, and considering the occasion of the meeting, and the intentions of the parties, as demonstrated by their whole conduct, and by the evidence which has been adduced, you cannot by possibility find in the pamphlet any thing to force you to say, by your verdict, that the author, publisher or seller must have acted with the intention of subverting the Constitution, or filling the kingdom with trouble and dissention. You will understand, then, that I do not wish to defend these expressions as free from blame; but I have again to warn you that you are not entitled to find a verdict against these men as guilty of sedition, merely because you may think, as I do, that they employed improper expressions, in prosecution of a lawful object by lawful means. If you could permit your own sentiments respecting the objects which the petitioners had in view, or your feelings of disapprobation of the language which they employed, to influence for a moment your opinion as to their legal guilt or innocence, the consequences to the law and the liberties of these kingdoms would indeed be tremendous. If such a principle of judgment

were to be admitted, different men before different juries might, under similar circumstances, meet with very different verdicts. Every man who strongly believes in the propriety of particular sentiments, will, in expressing his honest opinions, regard opposite sentiments as excessively wrong, and as having a most pernicious tendency. A sincere Tory thinks the principles of the Whigs tend to render the Crown not fit to be worn, and to put the country in imminent hazard of anarchy and confusion. On the other hand, there is no honest Whig who does not believe that the principles of the Tories, if left entirely to themselves, would annihilate the privileges of the people, and put the Government on a level with that of any common arbitrary monarchy. In the opposite speeches of these two great parties, they continually arraign one another as defending principles leading to such conclusions. I hope neither of them will ever have an opportunity of seeing put to the test, unchecked, the prin ciples of their opponents. Perhaps you are neutral between these parties; and I am persuaded, that, at all events, you are possessed of liberal and fair toleration towards persons of a different way of thinking from you on political subjects, and that if their lives give the lie to any idea that they intend mischief, and if they are men generally looked upon as entertaining moderate views-though you think that the prac tical application of their doctrines would lead to evil conse quences, you will give them credit for upright intentions. Fairness and liberality require that trust and confidence should not be withdrawn from others, merely because they entertain different opinions from our own upon these disputable matters, particularly when it is universally known that different opinions are really entertained as to the actual safety of their doctrines. Therefore, admitting that a great part of the statement in the speeches would be dangerous, if the authors could convert the great majority of the peo ple to their way of thinking, (in which case I should think some of us were in a bad way), God forbid that any other weapons should be used against them, than those of argument and good sense;-God forbid we should think of binding reformers hand and foot, as the means of checking their erroneous doctrines.

Having made these few observations, I shall now more particularly examine the speeches which were made at the Dean Park meeting. And, first of all, I may remark, that the meaning of the passage in which the petitioners speak about the selfishness and aggrandizement of our rulers is sufficiently obvious. The Ministers for the time are quite plainly meant ;

for what kind of aggrandizement could the King or the Prince Regent look for? The term must mean persons who have something in view before then ; and not those who have already attained the heights of sublunary grandeur. Up this I am sure it is unnecessary to waste another word.

The next is the famous passage about hell and allegiance: and I shall not diminish the force of Mr Clerk's remarks on this subject, by offering many of my own. But what is the gloss now put on all this? The Public Prosecutor here sees tremendous sedition, and reads the meaning thus:

If you, the Prince Regent, will not become a reformer, we shall take up our weavers'-beams, and force you." Now, do the words necessarily bear such an interpretation? I say they 'do not. I say, not only that they do not bear it necessarily, but that they do not bear it at all, and that the plain meaning of them is quite different. I say that the passage is to this effect: We, the Weavers of Kilmarnock, want universal suffrage, and annual parliaments. We shall lay our petition for these objects at the foot of the Throne, where sits our August Prince, whose gracious nature will incline his ear to listen to the cries of HIS PEOPLE, which he is bound to d do by the laws of the country. But should he be so infatuated as to turn a deaf ear to THEIR just petition, he has forfeited THEIR allegiance." The important words are exactly as I have now cited them, and their plain, and indeed their only meaning is, that if the Sovereign disregards the voice of his whole people, he has no right to their allegiance. It is not agreeable to allude to the miserable extremity of an actual difference between the Sovereign and his subjects; and no wise or moderate man could contemplate the possibility of such difference, but in the most extreme circumstances. But is there any thing in what I have read, which a court of law could pronounce to be seditious at all? Our duty obliges us, in defending the pannels, to take refuge under the argument of an implied contract between the Sovereign and the subjects, which may be broken, and of course may be enforced upon either side. Now, keeping this principle in view, let us attend to what the petitioners really say. They say, We, the Weavers of Kilmarnock, want universal suffrage and annual parliaments, and will petition the Prince Regent on the subject, who is bound to listen to the cries of his people. What is the meaning of this? Do the "cries of his people" merely mean the cries of the weavers of Kilmarnock? Were these people really so blinded to reason, by hunger and their desperate situation, as to imagine that their voice alone could regulate any measure of public policy? Is there any