bours of Scotland
are subjected, and which must be supposed to be, and no doubt actually
are, founded upon the general principles of justice and equity which
pervade every civilised country. Amongst their mountains, as among the
North American Indians, the various tribes were wont to make war upon
each other, so that each man was obliged to go armed for his own
protection. These men, from the ideas which they entertained of their
own descent and of their own consequence, regarded themselves as so
many cavaliers or men-at-arms, rather than as the peasantry of a
peaceful country. Those laws of the ring, as my brother terms them,
were unknown to the race of warlike mountaineers; that decision of
quarrels by no other weapons than those which nature has given every
man must to them have seemed as vulgar and as preposterous as to the
noblesse of France. Revenge, on the other hand, must have been as
familiar to their habits of society as to those of the Cherokees or
Mohawks. It is indeed, as described by Bacon, at bottom a kind of wild
untutored justice; for the fear of retaliation must withhold the hands
of the oppressor where there is no regular law to check daring
violence. But though all this may be granted, and though we may allow
that, such having been the case of the Highlands in the days of the
prisoner's fathers, many of the opinions and sentiments must still
continue to influence the present generation, it cannot, and ought not,
even in this most painful case, to alter the administration of the law,
either in your hands, gentlemen of the jury, or in mine. The first
object of civilisation is to place the general protection of the law,
equally administered, in the room of that wild justice which every man
cut and carved for himself, according to the length of his sword and
the strength of his arm. The law says to the subjects, with a voice
only inferior to that of the Deity, 'vengeance is mine.' The instant
that there is time for passion to cool and reason to interpose, an
injured party must become aware that the law assumes the exclusive
cognizance of the right and wrong betwixt the parties, and opposes her
inviolable buckler to every attempt of the private party to right
himself. I repeat, that this unhappy man ought personally to be the
object rather of our pity than our abhorrence, for he failed in his
ignorance and from mistaken notions of honour. But his crime is not
the less that of murder, gentlemen,