Page:The World's Famous Orations Volume 6.djvu/120

THE WORLD'S FAMOUS ORATIONS is whether the allegation of a defect in your Constitution is so utterly unfounded and false that you can ascribe it only to the malice and perverseness of a wicked mind and not to the innocent mistake of an ordinary understanding; whether it may not be a mistake; whether it can be only sedition.

And here, gentlemen, I own I can not but regret that one of our countrymen should be criminally pursued for asserting the necessity of a reform at the very moment when that necessity seems admitted by the Parliament itself; that this unhappy reform shall at the same moment be a subject of legislative discussion and criminal prosecution.

Far am I from imputing any sinister design to the virtue or wisdom of our government; but who can avoid feeling the deplorable impression that must be made on the public mind when the demand for that reform is answered by a criminal information! I am the more forcibly impressed by this consideration when I consider that when this information was first put on the file the subject was transiently mentioned in the House of Commons.

This paper, gentlemen, insists upon the necessity of emancipating the Catholics of Ireland, and that is charged as a part of the libel. If they had kept this prosecution impending for another year, how much would remain for a jury to decide upon, I should be at a loss to discover. It seems as if the progress of public 110