The fact remains unshaken, that neither the Attorney-General of the present nor of the late Administration has prosecuted by himself or by others, and therefore the Queen’s name was as much usurped under the cover of the forms of the Court, as that of the public, whose name is invoked in support of these proceedings. I will venture to say, that no one who has really looked into them for himself, and is possessed of all the facts from the examination before the Committee of the House of Commons, can think with other feelings than those of shame and indignation, that they can take place in England--feelings, the more strong, because such proceedings are pretended to be undertaken in order to serve a cause with which, if they are identified, they will only serve to disgrace it. I cannot but believe that all this is felt by the majority (I know it is felt by very many) of the members of a society, whose zeal may be imposed upon at times, but the majority of whom must have that real benevolence of heart and soundness of judgment, which will make them wish for no other principle of action than that contained in the well-expressed sentiments of a noble lord--“That a good, however eminent, should not be attained otherwise than by lawful means[1]:” it may be added, that by no other can it be permanently attained. [1] Lord Aberdeen’s Letter to the Lords of the Admiralty, 20th May, 1842. The Society, to which I am alluding, was not more eager to start or to adopt the prosecution than the Committee of the House of Commons disposed to find a ground for its being undertaken, or than the last and the present Administration; indeed, the Society volunteered a disavowal of any connexion with the proceedings at their commencement, and did not express even an approval of them. In this, their organ only represented faintly the sentiments more strongly and decidedly repeated to myself by many members of that Society in a tone of unequivocal reprobation, and viewing the proceedings as calculated only to injure the cause which they had at heart. That such has been a very generally prevailing impression is fully attested by the plaintive remarks of the organs of the prosecution, and the libellous stimulants which, whilst the proceedings for the trial were in progress, they thought it necessary to apply. It is, indeed, but too true that a society, proposing to itself the accomplishment of some great moral and benevolent object, is most specially bound to confine itself to the use of such means only as are of as unexceptionable and even as benevolent a character as the end. Crime is, indeed, a just object of abhorrence; but a society, like the Anti-Slavery Society, is specially bound to guard themselves against the danger of encouraging one species of crime in their attempt to put down another; every one of the means they employ or sanction must be of as unquestionable purity as the end they profess to aim at: expediency, as