143: 24 St. Tr.]

(2.) Still the infatuated government went on, not conscious of the
spirit of Anglo-Saxon liberty it had at last roused from long, heavy
and deathlike sleep, and eleven days after brought Mr. John Horne
Tooke to trial. You remember, Gentlemen, that on the first anniversary
of the Declaration of Independence, he was tried for publishing a
notice of a meeting which raised L100 for the widows and orphan
children of our citizens who fell at Lexington on the 19th of April,
1775, and for that offence was punished with fine and imprisonment.[144]
After the acquittal of Hardy, the government brought Mr. Tooke to
trial, relying on the same evidence to convict him which had so
signally failed a fortnight before. The overt act relied on to convict
him of "levying war" and "compassing the death of our Lord the King,"
was membership of a Reform society! Mr. Erskine defended him: "I
_will_ assert the freedom of an Englishman; I will maintain the
dignity of man, I will vindicate and glory in the principles which
raised this country to her preeminence among the nations of the earth;
and as she shone the bright star of the morning to shed the light of
liberty upon nations which now enjoy it, so may she continue in her
radiant sphere to revive the ancient privileges of the world which
have been lost, and still to bring them forward to tongues and people
who have never known them yet, in the mysterious progression of
things."[145]

[Footnote 144: See above, p. 35.]

[Footnote 145: 25 St. Tr. 1.]

Gentlemen, Horne Tooke was acquitted--the government routed and
overwhelmed with disgrace, gave up the other prosecutions, and the
treason trials ended. Even George III. had wit enough left to see the
blunder which his ministers--the Slave Power of England in 1794--had
committed, and stammered forth, "You have got us into the wrong box my
Lord [Loughborough]; you have got us into the wrong box. Constructive
treason won't do my Lord; constructive treason won't do." By and by,
Gentlemen, other men, wiser than poor feeble-minded George III., will
find out that "constructive _misdemeanors_ won't do."

Of these trials, Mr. Campbell, himself a Judge, declares, "This [the
conduct of the government] was more exceptionable in principle than
any thing done during the reign of Charles II.; for then the
fabricators of the Popish Plot did not think of corroborating the
testimony of Oates and Bedloe by a public statute; and then, if the