Gentlemen, the very circumstances under which we meet in this case are of a character to excite mingled feelings of encouragement and alarm. Those whose duty it is to watch over the safety of the Queen’s subjects felt so much apprehension lest the course of justice should be disturbed by the popular prejudice which had been excited against the prisoner, so much alarmed that an unjust verdict might in the midst of that popular prejudice pass against him, that a resolution was taken, not only by the Queen’s Government and the Legislature, upon the motion of the noble and learned judge, who presides here, in the House of Lords, that an Act of Parliament should be passed to prevent the possibility of the ordinary forms of law being, in the case of William Palmer, made the instrument of popular vengeance. The Crown, under the advice of its responsible Ministers, resolved also that this prosecution should not be left in private hands, but that its own law officer, my learned friend the Attorney-General, should take upon himself the responsibility of conducting it properly, at once sternly in his duty to the public and fairly to the prisoner at the bar; and my learned friend, when that duty was entrusted to him, did what I must say will, in my opinion, for ever redound to his honour--he insisted that in a case in which so much prejudice had been excited all the evidence which it was intended on the part of the Crown to press against the prisoner should, as soon as he received it, be communicated to the prisoner’s counsel; everything, I must say and tell my unhappy client, everything which the constituted authorities of this land, everything which the Legislature and the law officers of the Crown could do to secure a fair and impartial trial in this case, has been done, and the whole responsibility, if unhappily injustice should on either side be done, now weighs with terrible pressure upon my lord and upon you. [Sidenote: Serjeant Shee]