guilty of blood where there was no actual positive proof that a homicide had at all been perpetrated, and when the chemical analysis had even demonstrated that it had not. Another, and perhaps one of the most common causes of prejudice in trials of this nature was the prevarication or the suspicious conduct of the party charged with the offence, and this, likewise, your lordship told the jury was proof of my brother’s guiltiness. Finding himself, though innocent, placed in an awkward predicament, the accused sometimes invented a plausible story in his defence, and the deceit being discovered, he was at once presumed to be in every respect guilty. Sir Matthew Hale mentions a melancholy instance of this kind. An uncle, who had the bringing up of his niece, to whom he was heir-at-law, correcting her for some offence, she was heard to say, “Good uncle, do not kill me!” after which she could not be found. The uncle was committed on suspicion of having murdered her, and was admonished by the judge of the assize to find out the child by the next assizes. Being unable to discover his niece, he brought another child, dressed like her, and resembling her in person and years; but, on examination, the fraud was detected, and upon the presumption of guilt which those circumstances afforded, he was sentenced to be hanged, and the sentence was executed. The child afterwards reappeared, when of age, to claim her land. On being beaten by her uncle she had run away, and had been received by a stranger; a jury, worked upon by suspicion, and probably also by a judge who pandered then, as judges pander now, to public prejudice, had thus murdered an innocent man; and that great Chief-Justice has preserved the fact as a warning for all time to beware of judgment in cases of life and death. Yet your lordship, who has succeeded that noble luminary of the law, forgot this memorable case in the moment when you ought most to have remembered it; though I take upon myself to say the circumstantial evidence against my brother was not half as powerful as that against this gentleman whose fate has thus been commemorated in vain by your lordship’s wise and Christian predecessor in the judgment seat. Yet do I believe that, as surely as the sun shines or that God lives in the heavens, there will come a day when my brother’s innocence will be demonstrated before all men, and though your lordship may not live to see it, yet will his blood cry out from his prison grave, and his fate will blacken the memory of all who were parties to his death with immortal infamy. For it is at your door the public will lay his conviction--not at that of the jury who were worked upon to convict, and who would have been more than men if they had resisted your looks, your gestures, your actions, and your arguments. My lord, since this conviction of death has been recorded I have seen William Palmer. I have visited him in his condemned hold. I have beheld