This is an offence to all who thrive upon theories, and in exactly the proportion of their affected or unreasonable belief of them. An instinctive alarm takes possession of such minds, and as they themselves cannot conceive that other people may have no theory of their own to serve upon that particular subject, which to them, and therefore in their opinion to all, must be paramount, they are disposed to imagine one theory of their own, which they at once fix upon the party thus offending against the assumed mental necessity of universal theorism. If the writer is not much mistaken, the irritation which is produced by this process of the mind, still more if self-interest is at the bottom, will materially help to reveal the moving-spring of the proceedings which are recorded in the following pages. Be this as it may, one thing is altogether unquestionable (and indeed there has been no attempt to disguise the fact, and to it I beg to call the attention of every man in Great Britain)--it is this: Pedro de Zulueta could never have been placed in the position in which he was (charged with felony under the finding of the Grand Jury), with the remotest chance of a conviction, if he had not voluntarily offered himself for examination before a Committee of the British House of Commons--the way being this--a London attorney lays hold of the printed Report of the proceedings; every part of the evidence given by Pedro de Zulueta, that was destructive of the hypothesis of his being a well-knowing and wilful abettor of an alleged slave trading speculation _in 1840_, is disconnected from those passages in which he had stated that, _in 1842, when he was speaking_ (after hearing and reading a mass of evidence given for the first time before that Committee), he had heard statements about his correspondents being participators in the slave trade which might be true, which were not, he felt, material to himself, and which, as he had not the means of disproving, he _then_ stated that he must _then_ believe; and then using this intelligible admission, _made in 1842_, the only one that could be found at all available, as the only presumptive proof of _guilty knowledge in 1840_. Nothing could be done or attempted against the house of Zulueta & Co., much less against the individual who was attacked, without this management, this distortion of the evidence--for some knowledge of some kind must be made out _in_ 1840, and although the fallacy was transparent, it might and unfortunately did serve for the purpose of the attack at the heart, and might still serve for the next, but not the sole object, of the prosecution. It is true, that the whole of the evidence given by me was read at the trial, for so the law requires it; but that same law, as was observed, also permits that those parts of a man’s statements which make in his favour should not be believed or taken for any thing, whilst such admissions as might be made to appear