_Mr. Brady_--Before Mr. Evarts proceeds to close the legal considerations involved in the case I feel it proper to advise him of a point for which I will contend, and on the discussion of which I do not now intend to enter. I will not admit that Congress had the power, under the Constitution of the United States, to pass the ninth section of the Act of 1790, which, upon my construction of it, would punish as piracy the act of an American citizen who should take a commission from England or France and then commit an act of hostility on an American ship or on an American citizen on the high seas. The argument is in a nutshell; though, of course, I shall give some illustrations at the proper time. It is this--that there is no common-law jurisdiction of offences in this Government; that it can take cognizance of no crimes except those which are created by Act of Congress, including piracy; and that the authority of the Constitution conferred upon Congress, to pass laws defining piracy and to punish offences against the law of nations, relates only to such offences as were then known, and does not invest the Legislature of the Federal Government with authority, under pretence of defining well-known offences, to create other and new offences, as is attempted to be done in the Act of 1790. ARGUMENT OF MR. EVARTS. _Mr. Evarts_ said: If the Court please, I shall hardly find it necessary, in stating the propositions of law for the Government, to consume as much time as has been, very usefully and very properly, employed by the various counsel for the prisoners in asking your attention to the views which they deem important and applicable in defence of their clients. The affirmative propositions to which the Government has occasion to ask the assent of the Court, in submitting this case to the Jury, are very few and simple. Your honors cannot have failed to notice that all the manifold, and more or less vague and uncertain, views of ethics, of government, of politics, of moral qualifications, and of prohibited crimes, which have entered into the discussion of the particular transaction whose actual proportions and lineaments have been displayed before the Court and Jury, are, in their nature, affirmative propositions, meeting what is an apparently clear and simple case on the part of the Government, and requiring to be encountered on our part more by criticism than by any new and positive representation of what the law is which is to govern this case under the jurisprudence of the United States.