"Besides, I must honestly tell you that I could not vote, or countenance in any way, a statute which stigmatizes with the crime of piracy these men, whom an Act of Parliament had previously put out of the protection of the law. "When the legislature of this Kingdom had ordered all their ships and goods, for the mere new-created offence of exercising trade, to be divided as a spoil among the seamen of the navy--to consider the necessary reprisal of an unhappy, proscribed, interdicted people as the crime of piracy, would have appeared, in any other legislature than ours, a strain of the most insulting and unnatural cruelty and injustice. I assure you, I never remember to have heard any thing like it, in any time or country." Gentlemen, I read this extract because it is the testimony of an eminently wise man, and an eminently just one. Such were his views at that day, and I am inclined to believe that those words spoken by him then have a better application to the state of things at present than any remarks I can make, or that can be made by any one of us who are in the midst of this whirl of excitement. But, gentlemen, the Government has chosen to make the issue. It was at liberty to do so; and that issue is piracy. Piracy, gentlemen of the Jury, you have heard defined by the eminent counsel who preceded me. The parties here occupy, as it were, a two-fold capacity. The eighth section of the Act of 1790 applies to piracy under the common law; the ninth section of that Act creates what we have called statutory piracy. The eighth section of the Act only alludes to piracy as it is acknowledged under the law of nations, and as known to the common law. The ninth section, however, differs from the eighth, because it applies peculiarly to citizens of the United States, and is supposed to be more enlarged in its character than the eighth section. Now, with reference to a portion of the prisoners here,--to those who are not citizens,--eight of them come entirely under the eighth section; and we shall contend that, under that section, they cannot be convicted. As regards the other four, it will be contended, that not only are they embraced by the first, but likewise by the second of these sections--that of statutory piracy, which applies peculiarly to them.