In this state of things the trial comes on. The facilities thus far given to an unknown accuser have been seen, and to so frightful an extent, that even if the trial proceeds no further, an amount of incalculable and irreparable evil and misery may have been perpetrated. These facilities, it has been further seen, are not at all balanced by the strictness of the requirements of the law from the prosecution, they are all applied against the accused. The definition of the crime by the Act of Parliament is itself loose and capable of an unlimited application, and it is understood and laid down in the very largest, thereby including acts which are notoriously and expressly admitted to be in themselves perfectly innocent: the only qualification is the _knowledge_. This is brought to a lower point in the scale, _viz._ _suspicion_. With a show of ingenuousness, as if to put down _a quibble_, which in Court sounds like a zeal for the truth, the question is made to be, not whether _you knew_, but whether _you suspected_; and next, whether _you had reason to suspect_; the tendency really being towards the real point, to which you are only being gently let down, _viz._ whether witnesses can be found who will say that they themselves _knew_ very well a great many things, which ought therefore to have been known by yourself, and that therefore you must at least _have suspected_. Then the prosecution is not limited to the proof of one particular charge: here it is suffered to remain quite at large--they need not define the act they mean to charge, whether it is this, or that, or any thing else, upon the accused. The knowledge of the intent, in which every lawyer in the land whom you may consult previous to entering into any operation, will tell you, _before you are indicted_, that the guilt consists, after being brought down to a lower point, as observed before, is made out to be, 1st, any knowledge, not the knowledge in the particular case; 2nd, the knowledge of _others_, not _your_ knowledge; and the proof of it is no further put upon the prosecution than so far as to make out a case of _probable knowledge_, founded upon evidence of some general acts done by certain persons on other occasions, not the one in question, in distant countries--acts to which you are not shown to have been a party, or even probably acquainted with--persons in respect of whom all your proceedings in England are admitted to be in themselves, and as done towards them, perfectly innocent; such acts being done upon such other occasions by such persons in countries far away, little known, with which no regular means of communication exist--countries almost unknown to every one in England, and not at all proved to be known to yourself: and all this evidence given by individuals not in circumstances analogous to those in which the accused stands, but by individuals, and by no others, who in the exercise of a peculiar duty have sometimes visited the countries in question; and