s anything against the intelligence,
fairness, or integrity of the brilliant and distinguished officers
who compose the court, but merely touches the question of the right
of this tribunal, under the authority by which it is convoked. This
branch of her case is left to depend upon the argument already
submitted by her senior counsel, the _grande_ _decus_ _columenque_
of his profession, and which is exhaustive of the subject on which
it treats. Therefore, in proceeding to the discussion of the merits
of the case against her, the jurisdiction of the court, for the sake
of argument, may be taken as conceded.

But, if it be granted that the jurisdiction is complete, the next
preliminary inquiry naturally is as to the principles of evidence by
which the great mass of accumulated facts is to be analyzed and
weighed in the scales of justice and made to bias the minds of her
judges; and it may be here laid down as a _concessum_ in the case,
that we are here in this forum, constrained and concluded by the
same process, in this regard, that would bind and control us in any
other court of civil origin having jurisdiction over a crime such as
is here charged. For it is asserted in all the books that
court-martial must proceed, so far as the acceptance and the
analysis of evidence is concerned, upon precisely those reasonable
rules of evidence which time and experience, _ab_ _antiquo_, surviving
many ages of judicial wisdom, have unalterably fixed as unerring
guides in the administration of the criminal law. Upon this conceded
proposition it is necessary to consume time by the multiplication of
references. We are content with two brief citations from works of
acknowledged authority.

In Greenleaf it is laid down:--

"That courts-martial are bound, in general, to observe the rules of
the law of evidence by which the courts of criminal jurisdiction are
governed." (3 Greenleaf, section 467.)

This covers all the great general principles of evidence, the points
of difference being wholly as to minor matters. And it is also
affirmed in Benet:--

"That it has been laid down as an indisputable principle, that
whenever a legislative act erects a new jurisdiction, without
prescribing any particular rules of evidence to it, the common law
will supply its own rules, from which it will not allow such
newly-erected court to depart. The rules of evidence, then, that
obtain in the criminal courts of the country must be the guides fo