lect as the best of my speeches in Parliament.[10] For
more than two years we carried on the combat, trying every avenue
legally open to us, to the Courts of Criminal Justice. A bench of
magistrates in one of the most Tory counties in England dismissed our
case: we were more successful before the magistrates at Bow Street;
which gave an opportunity to the Lord Chief Justice of the Queen's
Bench, Sir Alexander Cockburn, for delivering his celebrated charge,
which settled the law of the question in favour of liberty, as far as it
is in the power of a judge's charge to settle it. There, however, our
success ended, for the Old Bailey Grand jury by throwing out our bill
prevented the case from coming to trial. It was clear that to bring
English functionaries to the bar of a criminal court for abuses of power
committed against negroes and mulattoes was not a popular proceeding
with the English middle classes. We had, however, redeemed, so far as
lay in us, the character of our country, by showing that there was at
any rate a body of persons determined to use all the means which the law
afforded to obtain justice for the injured. We had elicited from the
highest criminal judge in the nation an authoritative declaration that
the law was what we maintained it to be; and we had given an emphatic
warning to those who might be tempted to similar guilt hereafter, that,
though they might escape the actual sentence of a criminal tribunal,
they were not safe against being put to some trouble and expense in
order to avoid it. Colonial governors and other persons in authority,
will have a considerable motive to stop short of such extremities in
future.

As a matter of curiosity I kept some specimens of the abusive letters,
almost all of them anonymous, which I received while these proceedings
were going on. They are evidence of the sympathy felt with the
brutalities in Jamaica by the brutal part of the population at home.
They graduated from coarse jokes, verbal and pictorial, up to threats of
assassination.

Among other matters of importance in which I took an active part, but
which excited little interest in the public, two deserve particular
mention. I joined with several other independent Liberals in defeating
an Extradition Bill introduced at the very end of the session of 1866,
and by which, though surrender avowedly for political offences was not
authorized, political refugees, if charged by a foreign Government with
acts which