Publisher's Synopsis
Excerpt from A Letter to the Lord Chief Justice Campbell: Containing Remarks Upon the Conduct of the Prosecution and the Judges; With Strictures on the Charge Delivered to the Jury, Illustrative of Its Dangerous Tendencies to the Long-Enjoyed Rights and Privileges of Englishmen
Arter a struggle with internal emotions too dreadful to be described, amid the tears and lamentations of my family, the bereavement of a household knit together in bonds of strongest love and amity, and the smothered, not wholly concealed indignation of relatives and friends - I address your Lordship, not only as the man who has sealed my Brother's fate, and borne him to the foot of the scaffold, but as the Judge, who will have to render an account to your fellow-men, to posterity, and to God, of your dealing towards a human being, whose fate was, to a certain extent, placed in your hands, and on whose destiny you operated in a manner hitherto unknown, at least in our days. The Law, with bitter irony, propounds it as an axiom, dear to Englishmen, that a Magistrate invested with powers like your Lordship is counsel for the prisoner; but, every man who witnessed the late mockery at the Old Bailey, in which you played so prominent a part, confesses - to his own heart, at least, whatever he may own in public - that a more infamous delusion has never been solemnly enacted before a. British audience, since those days of shame, when J effreys went forth upon the bloody assize, and, in the name of Justice and the Law, con signed the young, the innocent, the helpless, and the stricken with years, to the dungeon and the gallows professing all the while to be but actuated by a sense of duty to the Crown and to the people.
These may appear strong words, and this a heavy accusation but I will demonstrate it to all who read this letter. What! Though I may not hope to move your Lordship to justice, yet I may, at least, awaken within you a sense of that awful day, which approaches you as cer tainly as it looms on my Brother, and which, at your advanced age, cannot be far removed. I may awaken within you a feeling of compunction, or, at all events, of solemn re?ection for you, also, will have to stand before a Judge enthroned in majesty and power before whom you will be, indeed, as nought; and when upon your brow appears the awful record of your administration of justice to the man whom you have condemned - in that hour, also, shall you remember this word from the Brother of his affections. May it avail you before that terrific moment May it serve to save yourself from yourself, and to warn you in time, that it is the duty of a British Judge to hear, not to condemn; to adjudicate, not to execute; to admi nister the law as the representative of the country, not to pervert it to his own purposes, with the anxiety of a hangman.
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