e but a very few more arguments to address to you, and I
am glad of it, for I assure you, you cannot be more exhausted in patience
than I am in strength.

I now, gentlemen, ask you even admitting that the _style_ and manner, in
which the opinions of the writer of this address are expressed, should
verge upon intemperance and impropriety, would you venture, merely upon
the ground of such a defect in style, to say the defendant is guilty;
when the very same opinions in substance, expressed in a different style,
would be innocent and legal, and unquestionable? Gentlemen, I have heard
it asserted, with a surprise that I cannot express, that if persons will
write in a moderate, delicate, temperate, and refined style they may
discuss questions which become exceptionable and forbidden if they are
handled in a coarse and illiberal style. Now I should have thought, that
the very reverse of this would have been the case; for by a refined and
guarded style you may insinuate and persuade--by vulgar coarseness and
intemperance you disgust and nauseate. To say that a political paper of
the very same sentiments, and principles would be innocent, written in a
calm and delicate style which would be criminal, written in an abrupt,
vehement and passionate manner, is to remove guilt from the thought and
conception and substance of a writing, and impute it to the medium only
of the thought, the mere expression. So that upon such a rule and
principle of decision, if I were to heap violent and gross abuse even on
Abershaw, or any other highwayman, who was deservedly hanged a hundred
years ago, I might actually be indicted for a libel. Such a course,
gentlemen, would be to degrade your judgments from a decision upon the
thought, and opinions (which, are alone important) of an author to a
criticism and condemnation of his words, and would be waging war with the
vocabulary and the dictionary, a degradation, to which I trust, your
reason will never submit. A difference of style in political writings is
much too refined and subtle to found a distinction upon between innocence
and crime. Difference of style is so minute, and is a subject of such
nice discrimination, that it would not only be difficult, but almost
impossible, and most unsafe for any jury to attempt by it to draw a line
between guilt and innocence; besides, what would be the effect upon the
press? If I were told, when I sat down to write upon any topic, that I
must treat it in