eature concerning his own affairs. We may make the
nature of such a doubt clearer to the court by alluding to a very
common rule in the application of the general principle in certain
cases, and the rule will readily appeal to the judgment of the court
as a remarkable and singularly beautiful example of the inexorable
logic with which the law applies its own unfailing reason.

Thus, in case of conspiracy, and some others, where many persons are
charged with joint crime, and where the evidence against most of
them must, of necessity, be circumstantial, the plea of "reasonable
doubt" becomes peculiarly valuable to the separate accused, and the
mode in which it is held it can best be applied is the test whether
the facts as proved, circumstantial, as supposed, can be made to
consist just as reasonably with a theory that is essentially
different from the theory of guilt.

If, therefore, in the developments of the whole facts of a
conspiracy, all the particular facts against a particular person can
be taken apart and shown to support a reasonable theory that
excludes the theory of guilt, it cannot be denied that the moral
proof of the latter is so shaken as to admit the rule concerning the
presumption of innocence. For surely no man should be made to
suffer because certain facts are proved against him, which are
consistent with guilt, when it can be shown that they are also, and
more reasonably, consistent with innocence. And, as touching the
conspiracy here charged, we suppose there are hundreds of innocent
persons, acquaintances of the actual assassin, against whom, on the
social rule of _noscitur_ _a_ _sociis_, mercifully set aside in law,
many facts might be elicited that would corroborate a suspicion of
participation in his crime; but it would be monstrous that they
should suffer from that theory when the same facts are rationally
explainable on other theories.

The distinguished assistant judge advocate, Mr. Bingham, who has
brought to the aid of the prosecution, in this trial, such ready and
trenchant astuteness in the law, has laid the following down as an
invariable rule, and it will pass into the books as such:--

"A party who conspires to do a crime may approach the most upright
man in the world with whom he had been, before the criminality was
known to the world, on terms of intimacy, and whose position in the
world was such that he might be on terms of intimacy with reputable
gentlemen. It is the misfor