your covenant, you drive him back to the first law of nature, and you
hang him, not because he is guilty, but because you have left him naked
and starving! [A murmur among the mob below, with great difficulty
silenced.] One thing only I will add, and that not to move your mercy,--
no, nor to invest my fate with an idle and momentary interest,--but
because there are some persons in this world who have not known me as
the criminal who stands before you, and whom the tidings of my fate may
hereafter reach; and I would not have those persons view me in blacker
colours than I deserve. Among all the rumours, gentlemen, that have
reached you, through all the tales and fables kindled from my unhappy
notoriety and my approaching doom, I put it to you, if you have heard
that I have committed one sanguinary action or one ruinous and deliberate
fraud. You have heard that I have lived by the plunder of the rich,--I
do not deny the charge. From the grinding of the poor, the habitual
overreaching, or the systematic pilfering of my neighbours, my conscience
is as free as it is from the charge of cruelty and bloodshed. Those
errors I leave to honest mediocrity or virtuous exertion! You may
perhaps find, too, that my life has not passed through a career of
outrage without scattering some few benefits on the road. In destroying
me, it is true that you will have the consolation to think that among the
benefits you derive from my sentence will be the salutary encouragement
you give to other offenders to offend to the last, degree, and to divest
outrage of no single aggravation! But if this does not seem to you any
very powerful inducement, you may pause before you cut off from all
amendment a man who seems neither wholly hardened nor utterly beyond
atonement. My lord, my counsel would have wished to summon witnesses,--
some to bear testimony to redeeming points in my own character, others to
invalidate the oath of the witness against me,--a man whom I saved from
destruction in order that he might destroy me. I do not think either
necessary. The public Press has already said of me what little good does