"But with this military commission, gentlemen, you have no concern at this time; whether it was a legal or illegal tribunal, is not the matter on which you are now called to decide. The oath that you have taken requires that you shall 'well and truly try, and true deliverance make between the United States of America and John H. Surratt, the prisoner at the bar, whom you have in charge, and a true verdict give according to your evidence.' The prisoner stands before you indicted for the murder of Abraham Lincoln on the 14th day of April, 1865, in this city. About the time and place and manner of the death of your late President no controversy has been made in the case. If there had been your recollection of a nation in tears, and of a whole civilized world in mourning would have revived your memory of the sad and terrible fact. The only question, therefore, for you to determine is, whether the prisoner at the bar participated with John Wilkes Booth and the others named in the indictment, or either or any of them, in the diabolical crime. If, from all the evidence in the case, your minds shall be convinced beyond a reasonable doubt growing out of that evidence that the prisoner did co-operate with them; if that shall have produced a moral conviction in your minds that the prisoner did participate in the conspiracy to murder, or in a plot to do some unlawful act which resulted in this foul murder, no consideration as to the legality or illegality of the tribunal which tried the prisoner's mother; no feelings of sympathy for other members of the family; no consideration of his youth, or that other lives have already been forfeited for the crime, should for a single moment, tempt you to step aside from the plain pathway of duty." The last paragraph quoted is directed to some of the many artful appeals made to the political prejudices or to the feelings of the jury to swerve them from the duty devolved upon them by their oath. The former paragraphs may well be said to set at rest forever the question of the right of a government to defend its life when the occasion requires it by sending offenders against its life before a military commission for trial. This question may be taken as settled, as is the question of the right of the federal government to coerce into submission a refractory State. The opportunity thus sought by the prisoner's counsel to foist upon the public mind the assertion that the Supreme Court of the United States had made a decision denying to the government this right, thus gave occasion not only for denying that such opinion had ever been delivered, but also for showing that it never could be. It will be remembered that for reasons heretofore given the crime charged in the indictment was simply that of murder--the murder of Abraham Lincoln.