t in open day. Of this, Gentlemen of the Jury, in due
time.

[Footnote 50: See his Defence of Hardy, 24 St. Tr. 877.]

* * * * *

The mass of men, busy with their honest work, are not aware what power
is left in the hands of judges--wholly irresponsible to the people;
few men know how they often violate the laws they are nominally set to
administer. Let me take but a single form of this judicial
iniquity--the Use of Torture, borrowing my examples from the history
of our mother country.

In England the use of torture has never been conformable either to
common or to statute law; but how often has it been practised by a
corrupt administration and wicked judges! In 1549 Lord Seymour of
Sudley, Admiral of England, was put to the torture;[51] in 1604 Guy
Fawkes was "horribly racked."[52] Peacham was repeatedly put to
torture as you have just now heard, and that in the presence of Lord
Bacon himself in 1614.[53] Peacock was racked in 1620, Bacon and Coke
both signing the warrant for this illegal wickedness,--"he deserveth
it as well as Peacham did," said the Lord Chancellor, making his own
"ungodly custom" stand for law.[54] In 1627 the Lord Deputy of Ireland
wanted to torture two priests, and Charles I. gave him license, the
privy council consenting--"all of one mind that he might rack the
priests if he saw fit, and hang them if he found reason!"[55] In 1628
the judges of England solemnly decided that torture was unlawful; but
it had always been so,--and Yelverton, one of the judges, was a member
of the commission which stretched Peacham on the rack.[56] Yet, spite
of this decision, torture still held its old place, and a warrant from
the year 1610 still exists for inflicting this illegal atrocity on a
victim of the court.[57] Yet even so late as 1804, when Thomas Pictou,
governor of Trinidad, put a woman to tortures of the most cruel
character, by the connivance of the court he entirely escaped from all
judicial punishment.[58] Yes, torture was long continued in England
itself, though not always by means of thumbscrews and Scottish boots
and Spanish racks; the monstrous chains, the damp cells, the perpetual
irritation which corrupt servants of a despotic court tormented their
victims withal, was the old demon under another name.[59] Nay, within
a few months the newspapers furnish us with examples of Americans
being put to the torture of the lash to force a confession of their
alleged crim