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344 CURRAN. under foot; when venal sheriffs returned packed juries to carry into effect those fatal conspiracies of the few against the many; when the devoted benches of public justice were filled by some of those foundlings of fortune, who, overwhelmed in the torrent of corruption at an early period, lay at the bottom like drowned bodies, while sound- ness or sanity remained in them; but, at length becoming buoyant by putrefaction, they rose as they rotted, and floated to the surface of the polluted stream, where they were drifted along, the objects of terror, pestilence, and abomination. In that awful moment of a nation's travail; of the last gasp of tyranny, and the first breath of free- dom, how pregnant is the example. The press extin- guished, the people enslaved, and the prince undone. As the advocate of society, therefore of peace, of domestic liberty, and of the lasting union of both countries, I con- jure you to guard the liberty of the press, that great cen- tinel of the state, that grand detector of public imposture. Guard it, because, when it sinks, there sink with it, in one common grave, the liberty of the subject, and the security of the crown. "Gentlemen, I rejoice, for the sake of the court, the jury, and the public repose, that this question has, not been brought forward till now. In Great Britain analogous circumstances have taken place. At the commencement of that unfortunate war, which has deluged Europe with blood, the spirit of the English people was tremulously alive to the terror of French principles. At that moment of general paroxysm, to accuse was to convict; the danger seemed larger to the public eye from the misty medium through which it was surveyed. We measure inaccessible heights from the shadows which they project, where the lowness and the distance of the light form the length of the shade. There is a sort of aspiring and adventitious edulity which disdains assenting to obvious truths, and delights in catching at the improbability of circumstances as its best ground of faith. To what other cause, gentle- men, can you ascribe, that, in the wise, the reflecting, the