My learned friend might then have been compelled to have filed a criminal information against Mr. Peltier, for “wickedly and maliciously intending to vilify and degrade Maximilian Robespierre, President of the Committee of Public Safety of the French Republic!” He might have been reduced to the sad necessity of appearing before you to belie his own better feelings, to prosecute Mr. Peltier for publishing those sentiments which my friend himself had a thousand times felt, and a thousand times expressed. He might have been obliged even to call for punishment upon Mr. Peltier for language which he and all mankind would forever despise Mr. Peltier if he were not to employ. Then, indeed, gentlemen, we should have seen the last humiliation fall on England; the tribunals, the spotless and venerable tribunals, of this free country reduced to be the ministers of the vengeance of Robespierre! What could have rescued us from this last disgrace? _The honesty and courage of a jury._ They would have delivered the judges of this country from the dire necessity of inflicting punishment on a brave and virtuous man, because he spoke truth of a monster. They would have despised the threats of a foreign tyrant, as their ancestors braved the power of oppression at home. In the court where we are now met, Cromwell twice sent a satirist on his tyranny to be convicted and punished as a libeller, and in this court, almost in sight of the scaffold streaming with the blood of his sovereign, within hearing of the clash of his bayonets which drove out Parliament with contumely, two successive juries rescued the intrepid satirist [Lilburne] from his fangs, and sent out with defeat and disgrace the usurper’s attorney-general from what he had the insolence to call _his_ court! Even then, gentlemen, when all law and liberty were trampled under the feet of a military banditti; when those great crimes were perpetrated on a high place and with a high hand against those who were the objects of public veneration, which, more than any thing else, break their spirits and confound their moral sentiments, obliterate the distinctions between right and wrong in their understanding, and teach the multitude to feel no longer any reverence for that justice which they thus see triumphantly dragged at the chariot-wheels of a tyrant; even then, when this unhappy country, triumphant, indeed, abroad, but enslaved at home, had no prospect but that of a long succession of tyrants wading through slaughter to a throne—_even then, I say, when all seemed lost, the unconquerable spirit of English liberty survived in the hearts of English jurors_. That spirit is, I trust in God, not extinct; and if any modern tyrant were, in the drunkenness of his insolence, to hope to overawe an English jury, I trust and I believe that they would tell him: “Our ancestors braved the bayonets of Cromwell; we bid defiance to yours. _Contempsi Catilinæ gladios—non pertimescam tuos!_”