tice. If any prejudice of witnesses, or the imag. ination of Counsel, or any ill-timed jest shall at any time have diverted your attention, or if any prejudgment which you may have brought into the Jury Box, or any cowardly fear of popular opinion shall have operated to cause you to deny to the prisoner that dispassionate consideration of his case which the laws of God and man exact of you, and if, owing to such an error, this wretched man fails from among the liv. ing, what will be your crime? You will have violated the commandment, "Thou shalt not kill." It is not the form or letter of the trial by Jury that authorizes you to send your fellow man to his dread account, but it is the spirit that sanctifies that glorious institution; and if, through pride, passion, timidity, weakness, or any cause, you deny the prisoner one iota of all the defence to which he is entitled by the law of the land, you yourselves, whatever his guilt may be, will have broken the commandment, "Thou shalt do no murder."

There is not a corrupt or prejudiced witness, there is not a thoughtless, heedless witness, who has testified what was not true in spirit, or what was not wholly true, or who has suppressed any truth, who has not offended against the same in. junction.

Nor is the Court itself above that commandment. If these Judges have in aught been influenced by the excitement which has brought this vast assemblage here, and under such influ ence or under any other influence, have committed voluntary error and have denied to the prisoner or shall hereafter deny to him the benefit of any fact or any principle of law, then this Court will have to answer at that bar at which we all shall meet again, for the deep transgres. sion. When we appear there, none of us can plead that we were insane and knew not what we did; and by just so much as our ability and knowledge exceed those of this wretch whom the world regards as a fiend in human shape, will our guilt, if we be guilty, exceed his.

I plead not for a murderer. I have no inducement, no motive to do so. I have addressed my fellow citizens in many various relations, when rewards of wealth and fame awaited me. I have been cheered on other occasions by mani. festations of popular approbation and sympathy; and where there was no such encouragement, I had at least the gratitude of him whose cause I defended. But I speak now in the hear. ing of a People who have prejudged the prison. er and condemned me for pleading in his behalf. He is a convict, a pauper, a negro, with out intellect, sense or emotion. My child, with an affectionate smile, disarms my care-worn face of its frown whenever I cross my threshold. The beggar in the street obliges me to give, because he says "God bless you," as I pass. My dog caresses me with fondness if I will but smile on him. My horse recognizes me when I fill his manger; and even the toad that I spare in my walk seems to look up to me with gratitude. But what reward, what gratitude, what sympathy and affection can I expect here? There the prisoner sits. Look at him. Look at the assemblage around you. Listen to their ill suppressed censures and their excited fears, and tell me where among my neighbors or my fellow men, where even in his heart, I can ex

pect to find the sentiment, the thought, not to say of reward or of acknowledgement, but even of recognition. I sat here two weeks during the preliminary trial. I stood here between the prisoner and the Jury nine hours and pleaded for the wretch that he was insane and did not even know he was on trial: and when all was done, the Jury thought, at least eleven of them thought, that I had been deceiving them or was self-deceived. They read signs of intelligence in his idiotic smile, and of cunning and malice in his stolid insensibility. They rendered a verdiet that he was sane enough to be tried, a con. temptible compromise verdict in a capital case; and then they looked on, with what emotions God and they only know, upon his arraignment. The District Attorney, speaking in his adder ear, bade him rise, and reading to him one indictment, asked him whether he wanted a trial, and the poor fool auswered, No. Have you Counsel? No. And they went through the same mockery, the prisoner giving the same answers, until a third indictment was thundered in his ears, and he stood before the Court, silent, motionless and bewildered. Gentlemen, you may think of this evidence what you please, bring in what verdict you can, but I asseverate before Heaven and you that to the best of my knowledge and belief the prisoner at the bar does not at this moment know why it is that my shadow talls on you instead of his own.

I speak with all sincerity and earnestness, not because I expect my opinion to have weight, but I would disarm the injurious impression that I am speaking, merely as a lawyer speaks for his client. I am not the prisoner's lawyer. I am indeed a volunteer in his behalf. Society and mankind have the deepest interests at stake. I am the lawyer for society, for mankind, shocked beyond the power of expression, at the scene I have witnessed here of trying a maniac as a malefactor. In this, almost the first of such causes I have ever tried, the last I hope that I shall ever see, I wish that I could perform my duty with more effect. If I suffered myself to look at the volumes of testimony through which I have to pass, to remember my entire want of preparation, the pressure of time and my wasted strength and energies, I should despair of acquitting myself as you and all good men will hereafter desire that I should have performed so sacred a duty. But in the cause of humanity we are encouraged to hope for Divine assistance where human powers are weak. As you all know, I provided for my way through these trials, neither gold nor silver in my purse, nor scrip; and when I could not think beforehand what I should say, I remembered that it was said to those who had a beneficent commissiou, that they should take no thought what they should say when brought before the mag. strate, for in that same hour it should be given then what they should say, and it should not be they who should speak, but the spirit of their Father speaking in them.

You have promised, Gentlemen, to be impartial. You will find it more difficult than you have supposed. Our minds are liable to be swayed by temporary influences, and above all by the influences of masses around us. At every stage of this trial your attention has been diverted, as it will be hereafter, from the only question which it involves, by the eloquence of

O the Counsel for the, People reminding you of the slaughter of that helpless and innocent family, and of the danger to which society is exposed by e relaxing the rigor of the laws. Indignation 1 against crime and apprehensions of its recurrence are elements on which public justice relies s for the execution of the law. You must indulge that indignation. You cannot dismiss such apS prehensions. You will in common with your e fellow citizens deplore the destruction of so many precious lives, and sympathize with mourn ing relations and friends. Such sentiments can. not be censured when operating upon the con munity at large, but they are to be deplored deeply when they are manifested in the Jury - Box.

Then again a portion of this issue has been I tried, imperfectly tried, unjustly tried, before. I A Jary of twelve men, you are told, have al ready rendered their verdict that the prisoner is e now sane. The deference which right minded men yield to the opinions of others, the timidity 5 which weak men feel in dissenting from others, - may tempt you to surrender your own indepen dence. I warn you that that verdict is a reed 1 which will pierce you through and through. That Jury were selected without peremptory challenge. Many of the Jurors entered the pannel with settled topinions that the prisoner was not only guilty of the homicide, but sane, and all might have enter. tained such opinions for all that the prisoner could , do. It was a verdict founded on such evidence as could be hastily collected in a community where it required moral courage to testimony for the accused. Testimony was excluded upon friv. Iolous and unjust pretences. The cause was sub-mitted to the Jury on the 4th of July, and under circumstances calculated to convey a malicious and unjust spirit into the Jury Box. It was a strange celebration. The dawn of the Day of Independence was not greeted with cannon or bells. No lengthened procession was seen in our streets, nor were the voices of orators heard in our public halls. An intense excitement brought a vast multitude here, complaining of the delay and the expense of what was deemed an unnecessary trial, and demanding the sacrifice of a victim, who had been spared too long already. For hours that assemblage was roused and excited by denunciations of the prisoner and ridicule of his deafness, his ignorance and his imbecility. Before the Jury retired, the Court were informed that they were ready to render the verdict required. One Jurot, however, hesitated. The next day was the Sabbath. The Jury were called and the Court remonstrated with the dissentient and pressed the necessi ty of a verdict. That Juror gave way at last, and the bell which summoned our citizens to Church for the evening service, was the signal for the discharge of the Jury, because they had agreed. Even thus a legal verdict could not be extorted. The eleven Jurors, doubtless under an intimation from the Court, compromised with the twelfth and a verdict was rendered, not in the language of the law that the prisoner was "not insane," but that he was sufficiently sane in mind and memory to distinguish between right and wrong"; a verdict which implied that the prisoner was at least partially in sane, was diseased in other faculties beside the memory, and partially diseased in that, and that although he had mind and memory to distin

guish between right and wrong in the abstract, he had not reason and understanding and will to regulate his conduct according to that distinction-in short, a verdict by which the Jury unworthily evaded the question submitted to them and cast upon the Court a responsibility which it had no right to assume, but which it did nevertheless assume in violation of the law. That twelfth Juror was afterwards drawn as a Juror in this cause and was challenged by the Counsel for the People for partiality to the pris oner, and the challenge was sustained by the Court, because, although he had, as the Court say, pronounced by his verdict that the prisoner was sane, he then declared that he believed the prisoner insane, and would die in the Jury Box before he would render a verdict that he was sane. Last and chief of all objections to that verdict now, it has been neither pleaded nor proved here, and therefore is not in evidence before you. I trust then that you will dismiss to the contempt of mankind that Jury and their ver dict, thus equivocating upon law and science, health and disease, crime and innocence.

Again. An interior standard of intelligence has been set up here as the standard of the negro race, and a false one as the standard of the Asiatic race. This prisoner traces a divided lin eage. On the paternal side his ancestry is lost among the tiger-hunters on the Gold Coast of Africa, while his mother constitutes a portion of the small remnant of the Narragansett tribe. Hence it is held that the prisoner's intellect is to be compared with the depreciating standard of the African and his passions with the violent and ferocious character falsely imputed to the Aborigines. Indications of manifest derangement or at least of imbecility approaching to Idiocy are therefore set aside on the ground that they harmonize with the legitimate but degraded characteristics of the races from which he is descended. You, gentlemen, have or ought to have lifted up your souls above the bondage of prejudices so narrow and so mean as these. The color of the prisoner's skin and the form of his features are not impressed upon the spiritual, iminor al mind which works beneath. In spite of human pride he is still your brother and mine, in form and color accepted and approved by his Father and yours and mine, and bears equally with us the proudest inheritance of our race, the image of our Maker. Hold him then to be a man. Exact of him all the responsibilities which should be exacted under like circumstances if he belonged to the Anglo-Sax. on race, and make for him all the allowances and deal with him with all the tenderness which under like circumstances you would expect for yourselves.

The prisoner was obliged, no, his Counsel were obliged by law to accept the plea of not guilty, which the Court directed to be entered in his behalf. That plea denies the homicide. If the law had allowed it, we would gladly have admitted all the murders of which the prisoner I was accused, and have admitted them to be as unprovoked as they were cruel, and have gone directly before you on the only defence upon which we have insisted or shall insist or could insist, that he is irresponsible because he was and is insane.

We labor not only under these difficulties, but under the further embarrassment that the plea