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Updated: June 6, 2025
This we apprehend annihilates our charter right to govern and tax ourselves. It strikes at our British privileges which, as we have never forfeited them, we hold in common with our fellow-subjects who are natives of Great Britain.
If the ministry can raise money only by the destruction of their fellow-subjects, they ought to abandon those schemes for which the money is necessary: for what calamity can be equal to unbounded wickedness?
You have no such right; and as to the wisdom of treating my differences of opinion and the peaceable expression of it as a penal offence and the wisdom of a political act ought to be a serious question with all good and loyal citizens consider that the opinion you are invited by the crown prosecutors to pronounce to be a penal offence is not mine alone, nor that of the five men herein indicted, but is the opinion of all the 30,000 persons estimated by the crown evidence to have taken part in the assembly of the 8th of December; is the opinion besides of the 90,000 or 100,000 others who, standing in the streets of this city, or at the open windows overlooking the streets traversed by the procession that day, manifested their sympathy with the objects of the procession; is the opinion, as you are morally certain, of some millions of your Irish fellow-subjects.
Nor were there any who could order the resentment into battalions of fighting men to give point to the demands for equal rights with their English fellow-subjects.
If we inquire into the suspicions of our fellow-subjects, we shall find them generally disturbed with fears that they shall be sacrificed to the security of foreign dominions, and, therefore, it is necessary to recall their affection to his majesty where it is impaired, and confirm their confidence where it has been hitherto preserved, by showing, in the most publick manner, how vainly they have been disquieted, and how grossly they have been mistaken.
It is the very ancient privilege of the people of England that they shall be tried, except in the known exceptions, not by judges appointed by the Crown, but by their own fellow-subjects, the peers of that county court at which they owe their suit and service; out of this principle trial by juries has grown.
They are a singularly poisonous by-product of Empire, all the more poisonous for their brag; and though they belong to the class whom their relations gladly contribute to emigrate, they are far worse employed in debauching and plundering our so-called fellow-subjects in Africa than they would be in the public-houses, gambling-dens, pigeon-shooting enclosures, workhouses, and jails of their native land.
And indeed, gentlemen of the jury, there cannot be a greater proof of the oppressive spirit which animates this penal and inhuman code than the fact that so many of those, for whose benefit it was enacted, resisted its influence, on behalf of their Catholic fellow-subjects, as far as they could, and left nothing undone to support the laws of humanity against those of injustice and oppression.
I therefore freely admit to the East-India their claim to exclude their fellow-subjects from the commerce of half the globe. Those who carry the rights and claims of the company the furthest do not contend for more than this; and all this I freely grant.
"I cannot think," said Morton, "that even if the Duke of Monmouth should consider us as criminals, he would condemn so large a body of his fellow-subjects without even hearing what they have to plead for themselves. On my part I fear nothing.
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