g?" is taken from their
consideration; the intellectual question, "Has he done a deed which
amounts to the crime forbidden?" is not before them; only the
mechanical question, "Did he do that particular act?" They are not to
inquire as to the Justice of the law, its Constitutionality, or its
Legality; nor the Justice or the Criminality of the deed--only of its
Actuality, Did he do this deed? Nay, sometimes the Judge treats them
as cattle, and orders them to _find the facts for the government_. If
they refuse, he threatens them with punishment.

Thus he constructs the Trial-Jury, the Law, the Evidence, the Crime,
and the Fact.

* * * * *

Now, Gentlemen, when this is done and done thoroughly, the Judge has
kept all the Forms, Presentment by the Grand-Jury, and Trial by a
Petty Jury; but the substance is all gone; the Jury is only a stalking
horse, and behind it creeps the Judicial servant of Tyranny, armed
with the blunderbuss of law,--made and loaded by himself,--and
delivers his shot in the name of law, but against Justice, that
purpose of all law. Thus can tyranny be established--while all the
forms of law are kept.[119]

[Footnote 119: See 1 Jardine, Criminal Trials, 110. 2 Parker's
Sermons, 266 and note.]

Gentlemen of the Jury, let me make this more clear by a special case
wholly fictitious.--Thomas Nason, a "Non-Resistant" and a Quaker, is a
colored citizen of Boston, the son and once the slave of Hon. James
Nason of Virginia, but now legally become a free man by self-purchase;
he has the bill of sale of himself in his pocket, and so carries about
him a title deed which would perhaps satisfy your Honors of his right
to liberty. But his mother Lizzie (Randolph) Nason, a descendant of
both Mr. Jefferson and Mr. Madison,--for Virginia, I am told, can
boast of many children descended from two Presidents, perhaps from
three, who

"Boast the pure blood of an illustrious race,
In quiet flow from Lucrece to Lucrece"--

from Saxon master to African slave,--is still the bondwoman of the
Hon. James, the father of her son Thomas. From the "Plantation
manners" of her master, the concubine, "foolishly dissatisfied with
slavery," flies to Boston, and takes refuge with her Quaker son, who
conceals his mother, and shelters her for a time. But let me suppose
that his Honor Judge Curtis, while at Washington, fired with that
patriotism which is not only habitual but natural and indige