And what is the false position in which this country appears before the whole world in the matter before us? It is this. Here is a people with whom trade and manufactures form very important elements of wealth, independent of the justly admitted tendency of both to promote civilization--a most important, but not the present consideration--these people thrive largely by their mercantile intercourse with Cuba, with the Brazils, with Spain and with Portugal, with the United States, with Africa, so much so, that they cannot dispense with that trade. Those of their people who follow the commercial career in all its branches, their merchants, manufacturers, and ship-owners, and conduct the intercourse with those countries, materially contribute to the welfare and to the prosperity of every class of the community in which they live. They contribute not a little to the support of the State, and when an emergency arises, when the credit of the country and the honour of the Crown are at stake, they are among the first upon whom the call is made, and is not made in vain: and yet the state of the law among this people who derive the important benefits, which have not certainly been exaggerated, from a commercial intercourse with the countries just mentioned, is such as to place those of their fellow-countrymen, who conduct that intercourse, and are therefore nearest in contact with those countries, liable to be dragged from the scene of their labours, so vital to the prosperity of this people, as common felons, upon an indictment secretly procured and obtained; and their very acts, notoriously necessary for carrying on the very operations of commerce, which the country cannot dispense with, are in the first instance to form the presumption of the guilt, and afterwards the proof of it, unless they can prove them to be _not guilty_. It is true that this people have anathematized a branch of trade which subsists in those countries, and have expunged that trade from their code of licit pursuits at an immense sacrifice to themselves, and are determined to extinguish it among the nations of the earth, as far as it can be done by lawful means; but inasmuch as they cannot dispense with all other intercourse with other countries, although fully aware that from that intercourse the proscribed traffic must necessarily derive assistance (since it cannot be separated from any one licit pursuit in the countries wherein it prevails), they are bound so to construct the law as to protect the men who conduct that intercourse, against any attacks which may be founded more or less on the use to which others, and not themselves, may turn the acknowledged necessary and legitimate acts, without which the intercourse cannot exist. And if such be the meaning of the law, as I have no doubt whatever there is not one man in Great Britain at all acquainted with these matters, who has not been, to this moment, in the understanding that such and no other was the state of the