"It appears that the French have offered premiums to encourage the African [slave] trade, and that they have succeeded. The natural presumption therefore is, that _we ought to do the same_. For my part, my Lords, I have no scruple to say that if the 'five days' fit of philanthropy' [the attempt to abolish the slave-trade] which has just sprung up, and which has slept for twenty years together, were allowed to sleep one summer longer, it would appear to me rather more wise than thus to take up a subject piecemeal, which it has been publicly declared ought not to be agitated at all till next session of Parliament. Perhaps, by such imprudence, the slaves themselves may be prompted by their own authority, to proceed at once to a 'total and immediate abolition of the trade.' One witness has come to your Lordship's bar with a face of woe--his eyes full of tears, and his countenance fraught with horror, and said, '_My Lords, I am ruined if you pass this bill! I have risked L30,000 on the trade this year! It is all I have been able to gain by my industry, and if I lose it I must go to the hospital!_' I desire of you to think of such things, my Lords, in your _humane phrensy, and to show some humanity to the whites as well as to the negroes_."[44] [Footnote 44: 5 Campbell, 460; 27 Parl. Hist. 638.] One measure of tyranny in the hands of such Judges is Constructive Crime, a crime which the revengeful, or the purchased judge distils out of an honest or a doubtful deed, in the alembic he has made out of the law broken up and recast by him for that purpose, twisted, drawn out, and coiled up in serpentine and labyrinthine folds. For as the sweet juices of the grape, the peach, the apple, pear, or plumb may be fermented, and then distilled into the most deadly intoxicating draught to madden man and infuriate woman, so by the sophistry of a State's Attorney and a Court Judge, well trained for this work, out of innocent actions, and honest, manly speech, the most ghastly crimes can be extorted, and then the "leprous distilment" be poured upon the innocent victim, "And a most instant tetter barks about, Most lazar-like, with vile and loathsome crust, All his smooth body!"