"Mr. Carrington, your honor, has gone outside of this record, and I must follow him to some extent, at least. He has gone outside of it in speaking of the military commission, defending the major generals and others. I am glad I recurred to it, for it reminds me of a statement of his that I desire to correct. He says we accused those honorable men of murder. No, sir; I refrain from any expression of opinion on that subject. It is true the most exalted judicial tribunal in the world, vindicating the liberty of American citizens and their constitutional rights against military authority, and maintaining the supremacy of the courts over military law, have pronounced that, and all other commissions similarly constituted, to be illegal; but what I denounce here is not the men who in judgment sat there, but the men conducting the trial, and who with this diary of Booth in their hands could have proved Mrs. Surratt's innocence by showing this conspiracy to have been organized on the 14th day of April, but who, though producing the toothpick and the penknife found on Booth, yet never so much as disclosed the fact that such a diary existed. "They never made it known to those men or to the country. Do they not deserve to be denounced? Now that it has become known to the country, they come in before this jury to get them, with the diary in evidence before them, to find the same verdict that the military commission found. "I put a question to a witness on that stand (referring to Father Walter) and asked him, 'Did you administer the consolations of religion to Mrs. Surratt?' 'I did. I gave her communion on Friday, and prepared her for death.' I asked him, 'Did she tell you as she was marching to the scaffold that she was an innocent woman?' I told him not to answer the question before I directed him to. He nodded his head, but he did not answer the question, because he had no right to, as the other side objected. If you are going to try that woman, and she being dead is unable to be here to defend herself, can you not at least have charity enough to let her last words come in in her defence? Will you try one who is not only absent from the court, but is dead? While trying one that is dead, will you deny to her the poor privilege of having the last word she uttered on earth spoken in her vindication? Were you afraid of it? Did you feel that the words would sink deep into the hearts of everybody that was here in this room, and in the United States, and cause to well up from that heart a fountain of mercy, rich and pure as the fountain that sprang from the rock at the bidding of the sacred rod? Shame on you! Prepared for the world to come, and marching to the scaffold, with her God before her and the world behind her, and a load of sin laid at the feet of Almighty God, and no hope but in that eternal mercy upon which we must all rely, I ask whether she cannot at such an hour speak for herself? No! you answer. Why not?