Page:The World's Famous Orations Volume 6.djvu/94

THE WORLD'S FAMOUS ORATIONS the treasures from the Begums, declaring their innocence, and referring the governor-general in proof of it to Captain Gordon, whose life they had protected, and whose safety should have been their justification. This inquiry was never made. It was looked on as unnecessary, because the conviction of their innocence was too deeply impressed already.

The counsel, my lords, in recommending an attention to the public in preference to the private letters, remarked particularly, that one of the latter should not be taken in evidence, because it was evidently and abstractedly private, relating the anxieties of Mr. Middleton, on account of the illness of his son. This is a singular argument indeed. The circumstance, however, undoubtedly merits strict observation, tho not in the view in which it was placed by the counsel. It goes to show that some at least of the persons concerned in these transactions felt the force of those rites which their efforts were directed to tear asunder; that those who could ridicule the respective attachment of a mother and a son; who could prohibit the reverence of the son to the mother; who could deny to maternal debility the protection which filial tenderness should afford, were yet sensible of the straining of those chords by which they are connected. There is something in the present business, with all that is horrible to create aversion so vilely loathsome, as to excite disgust.

It is, my lords, surely superfluous to dwell on 84