6

Charge to the Grand Jury.

perly estimate the immense value of your national Union to your collective and individual happiness; that you should cherish habitual, cordial and immovable attachment to it; accustoming yourselves to think and speak of it as the palladium of your political safety and prosperity, watching for its preservation with jealous anxiety, discountenancing whatever may suggest even a suspicion, that it can in any event, be abandoned. For this, you have every inducement of sympathy and interest, citizens by birth or choice of a common country, that country has a right to concentrate your affections.

"The name of American which belongs to you in your national capacity, must always exalt the just pride of patriotism, more than any appellation derived from local discriminations: with slight shades of difference, you have the same, religious manners, habits and political principles.   You have in a common cause, fought and triumphed together. The independence and liberty you possess, are the work of joint councils and joint efforts, of common dangers, sufferings and successes."

This is the language of the farewell address which the great and good Washington left at his last benediction to his country. And remember, Washington was a slaveholder.

I repeat that your duties in the presentation of crime, extend only to the county of Mason. You must state the place where the crime was committed, to enable the accused to make defence understandingly; it is essential, and without designation of the place where the crime was committed, the indictment would be bad at common law, much more under our constitution, which secures the accused a right of trial in the county where he is charged to have committed the offence, and by a jury of the vicinage. Do not, therefore, suffer yourselves, by an honest enthusiasm for the public safety, or because of the alarming magnitude of the offence, to be deluded into a belief that this court can take jurisdiction of any crime committed out of the State.

"Heaven and earth may pass away, sooner than one jot or tittle of the ta-.tr shall be violated." And if you should inadvertantly present, for crime committed out of the county of Mason, the humblest citizen shall have the law, when the evidence comes to be heard in court. At the same time, however, it will be my honest pride to protect the interest of the community by a rigid exposition of the application of the law, as it is, to all offences against the peace and dignity of this commonwealth, within our jurisdiction. I will say like Lord Coke, upon a memorable occasion, "that I dare do every thing that it would befit a Judge to do."

When military power, and usurpation, caused Bollman and Swartwout, to be seized in New Orleans, and sent to Washington City, to be tried for treason, they were discharged by the Supreme court of the United States, "it being the unanimous opinion of the court that they could not be tried there." "But for offences committed on the high seas, or in any river, haven, bason, or bay, not with in the jurisdiction of any particular state, there is no court which has particular cognizance of the crime, and therefore the place in which the criminal shall ba apprehended, or if he be apprehended where no court has jurisdiction, that to which he is first brought, is substituted for the place in which the offence was com-