Page:The World's Famous Orations Volume 3.pdf/85

 And tho my words were not so advised and discreet, or so well weighed as they ought to have been, yet I trust your lordships are too honorable and just to lay them to my charge as high treason. Opinions may make a heretic, but that they make a traitor I have never heard till now.

I only admire how I, being an incendiary against the Scots in the twenty-third article, am become a confederate with them in the twenty-eighth article! how I could be charged for betraying Newcastle, and also for fighting with the Scots at Newburne, since fighting against them was no possible means of betraying the town into their hands, but rather to hinder their passage thither! I never advised war any further than, in my poor judgment, it concerned the very life of the king's authority and the safety and honor of his kingdom. Nor did I ever see that any advantage could be made by a war in Scotland, where nothing could be gained but hard blows. For my part, I honor that nation, but I wish they may ever be under their own climate. I have no desire that they should be too well acquainted with the better soil of England.

My lords, you see what has been alleged for this constructive, or, rather, destructive treason. For my part, I have not the judgment to conceive that such treason is agreeable to the fundamental grounds either of reason or of law. Not of reason, for how can that be treason in the lump or mass which is not so in any of its