Part 2

For the purpose not certainly of clearing up the question, but of sophisticating a very plain case, it will perhaps be asked, whether, if a man should avow himself before a Committee of the House of Commons to have been guilty of a crime, or to have partaken in it, is it meant to be contended that his candour is to be the safeguard of his guilt? One short answer is, that the remark is inapplicable to the case; for no such avowal has been even contended to have been made, but on the contrary a distinct and repeated general and circumstantial disavowal was made. Whether my declarations did or did not amount to such degree of information in my mind, at the time of giving my evidence, as presumed a knowledge two years before, that would be brought under the description of the _guilty knowledge_ described in legal phraseology, in an Act of Parliament, very obscure as is generally admitted, and never before put in practice, this was the utmost that the ingenuity of the prosecution could make out of my evidence--and this cannot be called an avowal of crime. The question is not, whether a crime avowed before a Committee of the House of Commons should or should not be prosecuted, using the avowal as one of the means of conviction--a question, which even so put is argued, I believe, on both sides by eminent lawyers--but whether in my case, such as it is, I have not a right to complain of the grossest and most unparalleled breach of good faith--whether the use made of my evidence is not one against which the conscience of every man revolts--whether it is likely to facilitate the public service, or to increase the respect due to the British Legislature at home and abroad, or to their proceedings--even if in other respects the course adopted is free from legal objections, which I believe is at least doubtful.

The fact itself is unquestionable, and I must repeatedly assert it--that the materials for my prosecution were collected from my own evidence as laid before the public, in the printed Report of the Committee, for whose information it was given--that in collecting these materials the statements, although formally read as they were made, were virtually vitiated--that, although the whole was read, only that part which was thought susceptible of some adverse construction was avowed to be of any necessary weight; and statements, such as they were, which had been _made in 1842_, after information that was at any rate only furnished in that year, were applied for the purpose of raising _a presumption of guilty knowledge in 1840_.

I have insisted so much upon this point, because it is very material that it should be borne in mind throughout the perusal of the following pages. I do not hesitate to believe that the unsophisticated sense of the people of this country will revolt at the fact of a Committee of the House of Commons having been turned into a trap wherein to take a man--a snare to his good faith--the more effectual, because the members who happen to compose the Committee stand high for honour and integrity in the land, and therefore their very names seemed to afford a guarantee that the fairest construction would be put upon the words of a respectable individual, who appeared voluntarily before them, without assuming from the outset that he is a self-convicted felon, who comes before them for no other purpose than to deceive, and who must be listened to only in order to see if he does not betray himself into some acknowledgment of his crimes, of which advantage is to be taken to secure the ends of justice, which he craftily endeavours to defeat. It may suit those who want such a monster of craft and subtlety in order to justify the monstrous proceedings, which have been deemed necessary to support a mischievous and unfounded theory that British capital is employed in the slave trade--it may suit them, to make me out to be this desideratum in their system; but, without laying claim to any more extended or more favourable notoriety than that which is on record, I venture to say that the attempt must fall to the ground, by the weight of its intrinsic absurdity, before the common sense of the people of this country.

But what the Committee thought of the evidence, after hearing at length the very individuals who appeared against me at the Old Bailey, and after hearing my own evidence, which formed the chief weapon against me in that Court, will be found in their own Report, printed in the following pages. Every reader may judge for himself, whether, in point of fact, it is not an anticipated condemnation of such proceedings as have been inflicted upon me--a verdict of not guilty, not only upon the transactions of the Augusta, but upon the whole of Zulueta & Co.’s agency for the houses mentioned, in my evidence, if the representation given by me of the transaction be substantially correct. In page 203 the following words will be found:--“In the first place, it is fair to state that we have no evidence, or reason to believe, that any British merchant, concerned in the trade with the West Coast of Africa, either owns or equips any vessel engaged in the slave trade, or has any share in the risk or profits of any slave trade venture”--a declaration this, the correctness of which every one conversant with the characteristic features of British commerce must acknowledge. Have any facts been elicited subsequent to this Report, and previously to the prosecution being instituted--any new evidence, which was not before the Committee of the House of Commons? This is a question which happily every reader of the following pages may settle for himself. Let him, as he peruses the evidence, at each stage of it ask himself the question--Was this before the Committee of the House of Commons? That it was, must be the answer upon every point. Not one statement was elicited from a single witness which had not been before the Committee. There was indeed an unworthy attempt to create a false impression about some casks and shackles having been left on board, even after the most unsparing of the witnesses for the prosecution had acquitted the vessel of even the shadow of a suspicion of containing the least implement available for a slaving equipment. How the attempt was foiled by their own witness afterwards will be seen; and I will not say a word more about an attempt upon which the very existence of a fellow-creature perhaps might hang, leaving it to be visited with the feeling of abhorrence which it must excite in every reader. Apart from this, there was before the Committee much more against me than there was before the Court, as may be seen by a comparison of the evidence as given before the one with that given before the other; because the nature of legal proceedings keeps the witness, even if otherwise disposed, within the limits of matter of fact--limits, which before the Court they did attempt to transgress, as may be seen very prominently in the case of the chief of them, but from which before the Committee it was in their power to wander, and they did accordingly so wander at every moment. Is it not fair to infer, that it was not to serve the purposes of justice, but at the very best that of some fancied expediency, that this prosecution was undertaken--a prosecution demonstrated to have been undertaken against the recorded sense and opinion of the Select Committee of the House of Commons? Suppose, for a moment, that by some quibble of law, by the forced interpretation of an Act of Parliament, admitted to be sufficiently obscure--not to speak of attempts to pervert evidence, or of the effort to carry off the victory, which constitutes the very essence of all legal conflict between individuals, and which of itself renders the right of private prosecution of public wrongs the destruction of civil liberty and of individual security--suppose, that by such means, what to the deliberate judgment of the Committee of the House of Commons did not appear to deserve even animadversion, might have been made out before an Old Bailey Jury to be such evidence of guilt, as to have procured an adverse verdict--is this the kind of justice which the people of this country would have approved? Impossible! I cannot believe it: the idea cannot be for a moment entertained.

But this is not all. We have seen what the Committee of the House of Commons decided. The Government--the proper, and the only proper agents, in a prosecution of this kind, upon whom, if sufficient ground existed, it was a bounden duty to have taken it in hand--seem to have treated the matter in the same manner as the Committee. All the documents which have been received in evidence, and some which were offered and were not received by the Court--that, in short, which forms all the evidence against the accused at the trial, and more, were in possession of Government before the last Administration went out (the proceedings before the Committee alone excepted)--that Administration did not take up the prosecution. The law-officers of the present Administration have had them also, and moreover the proceedings before the Committee, one of the members of which was a leading member of the preceding Government--they have not taken up the prosecution. A print in the favour and confidence, as it seems, of the parties to the late proceedings, has stated, that the actual law-officers of the Government were consulted and decided against their being undertaken; that again, when the bill was found by the Grand Jury, the prosecution was offered to them, but that they declined to be parties to it. These statements are followed up by remarks upon the apathy and indifference of the Government, which can only serve to render the testimony borne to the fact the more unexceptionable, because unwilling; for, otherwise, they afford only a lamentable specimen of how much mischief is done to a cause, the sole merit of which must consist in its being one purely of humanity, by its being used for the purposes of political warfare. This indeed is to trade with the cause of the slave.

The fact remains unshaken, that neither the Attorney-General of the present nor of the late Administration has prosecuted by himself or by others, and therefore the Queen’s name was as much usurped under the cover of the forms of the Court, as that of the public, whose name is invoked in support of these proceedings. I will venture to say, that no one who has really looked into them for himself, and is possessed of all the facts from the examination before the Committee of the House of Commons, can think with other feelings than those of shame and indignation, that they can take place in England--feelings, the more strong, because such proceedings are pretended to be undertaken in order to serve a cause with which, if they are identified, they will only serve to disgrace it. I cannot but believe that all this is felt by the majority (I know it is felt by very many) of the members of a society, whose zeal may be imposed upon at times, but the majority of whom must have that real benevolence of heart and soundness of judgment, which will make them wish for no other principle of action than that contained in the well-expressed sentiments of a noble lord--“That a good, however eminent, should not be attained otherwise than by lawful means[1]:” it may be added, that by no other can it be permanently attained.

[1] Lord Aberdeen’s Letter to the Lords of the Admiralty, 20th May, 1842.

The Society, to which I am alluding, was not more eager to start or to adopt the prosecution than the Committee of the House of Commons disposed to find a ground for its being undertaken, or than the last and the present Administration; indeed, the Society volunteered a disavowal of any connexion with the proceedings at their commencement, and did not express even an approval of them. In this, their organ only represented faintly the sentiments more strongly and decidedly repeated to myself by many members of that Society in a tone of unequivocal reprobation, and viewing the proceedings as calculated only to injure the cause which they had at heart. That such has been a very generally prevailing impression is fully attested by the plaintive remarks of the organs of the prosecution, and the libellous stimulants which, whilst the proceedings for the trial were in progress, they thought it necessary to apply. It is, indeed, but too true that a society, proposing to itself the accomplishment of some great moral and benevolent object, is most specially bound to confine itself to the use of such means only as are of as unexceptionable and even as benevolent a character as the end. Crime is, indeed, a just object of abhorrence; but a society, like the Anti-Slavery Society, is specially bound to guard themselves against the danger of encouraging one species of crime in their attempt to put down another; every one of the means they employ or sanction must be of as unquestionable purity as the end they profess to aim at: expediency, as distinct from justice, must be jealously guarded against, apt as it is to insinuate itself into all human proceedings, and never more subtilely than under the cloak of zeal in a good, cause: the smallest degree of evil to be done must stand as an insurmountable barrier to the accomplishment of the most undoubted good. It is in the power of man to destroy the very end in view, whilst he thinks he is advancing it; but he cannot alter the law of Providence, which dooms to certain defeat, even amidst the tokens of apparent triumph, whomsoever dares to modify for himself the moral code of the universe: the moment that violent hands are laid upon it, in order to smooth down a difficulty in the way of action, the very end itself becomes contaminated. All this is evident enough, and approves itself to the enlightened conscience. A society, as a body, taken in the abstract, may be supposed less likely to be led away by such apparently _short cuts_ when presenting themselves in their path; but these societies are, in practice, managed by individuals of whom the least scrupulous are sure to appear as the most zealous and most efficient--they are the most busy and the most forward--and, hence, the additional necessity for caution on the part of the more conscientious, inasmuch as the names of the good are too often the cover of the deeds of the bad, whose power consists exclusively in the moral weight attached to the acts which the good are made to appear as having sanctioned.

It would have been well for the credit of the Anti-Slavery Society, therefore, if the London Committee had retained the position in which they placed themselves by their own act of disavowal; instead of which, after being taunted by one or two prints, which have, pending the proceedings, used every exertion in their limited power to stimulate the passions of those whose good sense it was necessary to mislead, the London Committee have passed and published the following resolution:--

“At a meeting of the Committee of the British and Foreign Anti-Slavery Society, held at No. 27, New Broad Street, London, on Friday, December 8, 1843, Josiah Forster in the Chair,--The conduct of Sir George Stephen, in the prosecution of Pedro de Zulueta, Jun., in October last, being taken into consideration, the following resolution was unanimously adopted--

“That this Committee feel it to be due alike to Sir George Stephen himself, and the public interests of justice and humanity, to express their high sense of his philanthropic and public spirited conduct, in carrying on, upon his own responsibility, the prosecution of Pedro de Zulueta, Jun., and another, for slave trading; a course in which the decision of the Grand Jury, and the declared opinion of the Judge, have fully sustained him, and by which it may be hoped a salutary check will be given to the notorious implication of British capital and commerce in that nefarious traffic.

JOSIAH FORSTER, Chairman.”

Here, after using that description of the charge, which is calculated to convey a false notion of what was, and could alone, even by the worst construction and perversion, be imputed, as if the charge had been dealing in slaves, they express a high sense of the philanthropic and public spirited conduct of the prosecutor--necessarily including the inquisitorial proceeding before the Grand Jury--the mode of apprehension of the accused--the resistance to his being released on even large bail, and to his having time given him to prepare his defence--the shrinking from appearing as a witness in public, and stating there what he, the prosecutor, had been ready to swear before the Grand Jury--the bringing up of a witness to raise an appearance of the existence of facts, the very contrary of which had been deposed to before the Committee of the House of Commons by the leading witness for the prosecution in Court--all this forms that conduct, which must have been taken into the consideration of a committee of a benevolent society, and which in discharge of a duty of both justice and humanity that committee have pronounced as both philanthropic and public spirited.

The resolution proceeds to state, that in the course adopted by the prosecutor he has been fully supported by the decision of the Grand Jury and the declared opinion of the Judge. It is impossible to estimate what value to attach to the finding of a Grand Jury without knowing upon what evidence their finding was based. In the present case, one fact is beyond all dispute, viz. that Sir George Stephen appeared before the Grand Jury as the first witness, his name standing as such on the back of the indictment, and that he did not present himself in the witness-box at the public trial, although in Court from the beginning to the close of it--from which it results, that the Grand Jury had before them a witness, giving to them in private, evidence which he did not think proper to give in public. Must not the inference be permitted, that the Grand Jury would have thrown out the bill, as the Petty Jury threw out the indictment, unless some evidence, which was not offered to the latter, had been given to the former by a witness, and that too, unfortunately, by a witness who seems to have preferred the secret inquisitorial form, which still remains in British law, to the open and public path which was before him, and which is the proper boast of British justice?

Regarding the support derived from the expressions of Judge Maule, when applied to by Serjeant Bompas for an order for the payment of the expenses of the prosecution, it is not for me to speak; but that it does not extend to a sanction, in point of propriety, to the part taken by the prosecutor, nor to the manner in which he has discharged it, is very obvious.

This, however, is not the point to which I wish now to refer. The object of this publication, and of the preceding and following remarks, is not any vindication of myself, nor a crimination of the motives of any one beyond what the statement of facts may carry in itself; my vindication I consider ample in the exhibition of the facts themselves--in the verdict of the Jurors, after hearing a trial of two days duration, after a long and elaborate charge delivered when a clear day had elapsed subsequent to the defence--a verdict, which was not agreed to without consideration, which was pronounced by the foreman in the emphatic manner which the crowded Court witnessed, which was received by the spectators, consisting of some of the most respectable merchants, bankers, and professional men of the City of London, who had sat daily and patient witnesses of the proceedings, in a manner which has been noticed by the public press, and echoed by the leading journals of London, of Liverpool, and of other important mercantile cities of Europe.

The chief object proposed in this publication, and in these observations, is to place before my brother-merchants, in a connected form, the whole of the facts, which form my case, or rather the case of the firm of Zulueta & Co., from the first communication which preceded my examination before the Committee of the House of Commons, to the close of the proceedings at the Old Bailey, in order that the merchants of England may judge for themselves, and reflect upon the position in which they are placed, as resulting from the principle and doctrines which the proceedings contained in the following pages have disclosed to emanate from an Act of Parliament which has been passed these twenty years, but which has been for the first time tried upon my case. It may be said, that by merchants in general it is hardly known: we all know that dealing in slaves is prohibited, under severe penalties, by the law of England--we know that it is repugnant to the prevailing tone of education, to the opinions and feelings of our people--we know that, at all events, as it is carried on and can only be carried on, it is at variance with the spirit of Christianity, and therefore no man need read an Act of Parliament to abstain from having any, the slightest, concern in or with such a traffic; but even if these considerations were not enough--which England surely will not suffer to be supposed of her own merchants--even if these considerations did not go to the extent of precluding British merchants from laying out their capital on slave adventures, whether for themselves or others’ account, common prudence, in which respectable merchants in this country cannot be said to be deficient, does at once warn a man not to trust his funds to the issue of speculations which afford no security, over which he can exercise no control--so much so, that it is hardly possible to conceive in what shape, looking at all like business, British capital could be lent for the purpose or on the security of a slave trade adventure. All this has contributed to maintain merchants in utter ignorance of the provisions of this Act of Parliament, or of the use which might be made of its legal phraseology: but now, when a merchant, not at all suspected by his fellows--for that is on record--has been, to the astonishment of every one, dragged from his office to the police-station, and to the Old Bailey dock (more especially when this is done in spite of the resolution of the House of Commons’ Committee, in spite of the opinion of the law officers of the Crown) by a London attorney, it is time to look at the exposition of the law and the practical application of its provisions, which so extraordinary a proceeding has elicited; the more so, as it has been stated that “higher game is in view,” and that the prosecutor is still occupied in analysing the evidence given before the Committee; and when the Anti-Slavery Committee adopt and publish a resolution, in which it is stated, in reference to the late prosecution, that by it “it may be hoped a salutary check will be given to the _notorious_ implication of British capital and commerce in that nefarious traffic, the slave trade.” At any other time the absolute folly of the assertion would have suffered it to remain unnoticed; experience has shown, however, that there is somewhere the means, and that the will does exist, of doing mischief to an appalling degree.