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in the decision, and whether they are not precisely in point with the difficulties which I have anticipated, or with any others which opponents to the bill can possibly anticipate. I make a similar appeal to another noble and learned friend, who has filled the highest situation; I do not see him at this moment in his place, but to him also I might make the same fearless application.

I cannot, therefore, conceive a case on which a magistrate would be exposed to any difficulty under this bill, if it should pass into a law.

The cruelties which I have already adverted to, are either committed by owners, or by servants, charged with the care and government of horses and other cattle. If the owner unmercifully directs them to be driven to most unreasonable distances, or with burthens manifestly beyond their powers: if he buys them up when past the age of strength, not for a use correspondent to their condition, but upon the barbarous and wicked computation of how long they can be tortured to profit; in neither of these cases can the cruelty be imputed to the servant whom you meet upon the road, struggling to perform the unjust commands of his employer. The master is the obvious culprit-respondent superior-the spectators and the servant are the witnesses-and these are the cases where an indictment would operate as a most useful example, without oppression, to those who thus offend systematically against every principle of humanity and justice.

On the other hand, when no cruel commands are given to the servant, but his own malice offends at once against his master and the unhappy animal which he wickedly abuses, he of course is alone responsible; and these are the cases in which a summary jurisdiction would be most generally resorted to, as more favor. able at once to the disinterested informer and to the offender, who would be thus punished with a small penalty, and be delivered from an expensive prosecution.

The other House of Parliament will no doubt accomplish this in the further progress of the bill.

But in neither of these cases, which comprehend, indeed, every abuse which the bill extends to, is there any kind of danger that it will work oppression, or produce uncertainty in decision.

A man cannot, if an owner, be the subject of an indictment, because he may have been less considerate and merciful than he ought to be; nor, if a servant, for an unreasonable blow of temper upon an unmanageable charge. No, my lords! Every indictment or information before a magistrate must charge the of fence to be committed maliciously, and with wanton cruelty, and the proof must correspond with the charge. This bill makes no act whatever a misdemeanor that does not plainly indicate to the court or magistrate a malicious and wicked intent; but this generality is so far from generating uncertainty, that I appeal to every member in our great profession, whether, on the contrary, it is not in favor of the accused, and analogous to our most merciful principles of criminal justice? So far from involving the magistrate in doubtful discriminations, he must be himself shocked and disgusted before he begins to exercise his authority over another. He must find malicious cruelty; and what that is can never be a matter of uncertainty or doubt, because nature has erected a standard in the human heart, by which it may be surely ascertained.

This consideration surely removes every difficulty from the last clause, which protects from wilful, malicious, and wanton cruelty, all reclaimed animals. Whatever may be the creatures which, by your own voluntary act, you choose to take from the wilds which nature has allotted to them, you must be supposed to exercise this admitted dominion for use, or for pleasure, or from curiosity. If for use, enjoy that use in its plenitude; if the animal be fit for food, enjoy it decently for food; if for pleasure, enjoy that pleasure, by taxing all its faculties for your comfort; if for curiosity, indulge it to the full. The more we mix ourselves with all created matter, animate or inanimate, the more we shall be lifted up to the contemplation of God. But never let it be said, that the law should indulge us in the most atrocious of all propensities, which, when habitually indulged in, on beings beneath us, destroy everysecurity of human life, by hardening the heart for the perpetration of all crimes.

The times in which we live, my lords, have read us an awful lesson upon the importance of preserving the moral sympathies.

We have seen that the highest state of refinement and civilization will not secure them. I solemnly protest against any allusion to the causes of the revolutions which are yet shaking the world, or to the crimes or mistakes of any individuals in any nation; but it connects itself with my subject to remark, that even in struggles for human rights and privileges, sincere and laudable as they occasionally may have been, all human rights and privileges have been trampled upon, by barbarities far more shocking than those of the most barbarous nations, because they have not merely extinguished natural unconnected life, but have destroyed (I trust only for a season) the social happiness and independence of mankind, raising up tyrants to oppress them all in the end, by beginning with the oppression of each other. All this, my lords, has arisen from neglecting the cultivation of the moral sense, the best security of states, and the greatest consolation of the world.

My lords, I will trouble your lordships no longer than with admitting, for the sake of the argument, that there may be cases, especially in the beginning, where the execution of the bill may call for the exercise of high judicial consideration, through the dignity and learning of the supreme court of criminal jurisdiction. And here I cannot help saying, that it adds greatly to the security I feel upon this part of the subject, that when the bill shall have received the sanction of parliament, it will be delivered over to my noble and learned friend, who presides so ably in the Court of King's Bench. From his high authority, the inferior magistrates will receive its just interpretation, and, from his manly and expressive eloquence, will be added, a most useful inculcation of its obligations for I must once again impress upon your lordships' minds, the great, the incalculable effect of wise laws, when ably administered, upon the feelings and morals of mankind. We may be said, my lords, to be in a manner new created by them--Under the auspices of religion, in whose steps they must ever tread, to maintain the character of wisdom, they make all the difference between the savages of the wilderness, and the audience I am now addressing. The cruelties which we daily deplore, in children and in youth, arise from defect in education, and that defect in education, from the very defect in the law, which I ask your lordships

to remedy. From the moral sense of the parent re-animated, or rather in this branch created by the law, the next generation will feel, in the first dawn of their ideas, the august relation they stand in to the lower world, and the trust which their station in the universe imposes on them; and it will not be left to a future Sterne to remind us, when we put aside even a harmless insect, that the world is large enough for both. This extension of benevolence to objects beneath us, becomes habitual by a sense of duty incul cated by law, will reflect back upon our sympathies to one another, so that I may venture to say firmly to your lordships, that the bill I propose to you, if it shall receive the sanction of parliament, will not only be an honor to the country, but an era in the history of the world.

ERSKINE ON THE FEDERAL CONSTITUTION.

GENTLEMEN, we all but too well remember the calamitous situation in which our country stood but a few years ago; a situation which no man can look back upon without horror, nor feel himself safe from relapsing into again, while the causes remain which produced it. The event I allude to, you must know to be the American war, and the still existing causes of it, the corruptions of this government. In those days it was not thought virtue by the patriots of England to conceal the existence of them from the people; but then, as now, authority condemned them as disaffected subjects, and defeated the ends they sought by their promulgation.

The consequences we have all seen and felt: America, from an obedient, affectionate colony, became an independent nation; and two millions of people nursed in the very lap of our monarchy, became the willing subjects of a republican constitution.

Gentlemen, in that great and calamitous conflict, Edmund Burke and Thomas Paine fought in the same field of reason together; but with very different successes. Mr. Burke spoke to a Parliament in England, having no ears but for sounds that flattered its corruptions. Mr. Paine, on the other hand, spoke

A PEOPLE; reasoned with them,-told them they were bound by no subjection to any sovereignty, farther than their own benefit connected them; and by these powerful arguments prepared the minds of the American people for that glorious, just, and happy revolution.

Gentlemen, I have a right to distinguish it by these epithets, because I aver that at this moment there is as sacred a regard to property; as inviolable a security to all the rights of individuals; lower taxes; fewer grievances; less to deplore, and more to admire, in the constitution of America, than that of any other country under heaven. I wish indeed to except our own, but I cannot even do that, till it shall be purged of those abuses which, though they obscure and deform the surface, have not as yet, thank God, destroyed the vital parts.

ERSKINE ON THE LIBERTY OF THE PRESS.

Ir now only remains to remind you, that another consideration has been strongly pressed upon you, and, no doubt, will be insisted on in reply.-You will be told, that the matters which I have been justifying as legal, and even meritorious, have therefore not been made the subject of complaint; and that whatever intrinsic merit parts of the book may be supposed or even admitted to possess, such merit can afford no justification to the selected passages, some of which, even with the context, carry the meaning charged by the information, and which are indecent animadversions on authority. To this I would answer (still protesting as I do against the application of any one of the innuendoes), that if you are firmly persuaded of the singleness and purity of the author's intentions, you are not bound to subject him to infamy, because, in the zealous career of a just and animated composition, he happens to have tripped with his pen into an intemperate expression in one or two instances of a long work. If this severe duty were binding on your consciences, the liberty of the press would be an empty sound, and no man could venture to write on

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