If your honors please, I have endeavored, so far as it was possible, to abbreviate what I have had to say on this subject. It is a very interesting one, undoubtedly, not only to the legal student, but to all persons in the country. This war is a war to reclaim those States. To attempt to reclaim them by prosecutions for piracy, or by acts of hostility which disregard them as having any form of society,--it seems to me that no national evil could be greater. The idea that in a commercial city it is very offensive that there should be privateers, is a trifle. The navy can regulate that. Let them look more to the privateers that want to get out than to the prizes that want to come in, and that will be provided for. We need not violate principles of law, or of humanity, or the common sense of the world, to produce an effect of that kind. We need to show that, in the midst of all this excitement and outcry against piracy--in the midst of a press that never names any of these people without calling them "pirates"--the men brought in always in chains, for the purpose of exciting public indignation against them and preventing their being treated as men of common rights and common interests with us--all which is very humiliating, it seems to me--in a Court of Justice no such feelings will be succumbed to. Certain I am that, where I stand, no such principles will be put in use. Justice will come--severe and stern, it may be--but it will be justice, with truth, and reason, and humanity, and political tenderness accompanying all its acts and all its judgments. _Mr. Larocque_: If the Court please, I had hoped to be saved the necessity of addressing your honors upon these propositions of law; but, in the distribution that has been made among the counsel, it has fallen to my lot to present the propositions in reference to which my opening was made, yesterday, to the Jury, and which will be adverted to by the counsel who, on our side, will close the case; and, simply, without detaining your honors, at this late hour, with any remarks upon them further than the reading of some extracts from authorities I have collected, I will present the propositions, leaving them to the action of your honors, and to the remarks of my associate, who will close this case, after we have ascertained the direction it will take before the Jury. The first proposition I had stated, with reference to jurisdiction: "That the defendants, after their capture and confinement as criminals, for the acts charged in this indictment, having been taken within the District of Virginia, on board the vessel on which they were so confined before being brought within the Southern District of New York, cannot be convicted under this indictment."