"And be it further enacted, that if any citizen should commit any piracy or robbery aforesaid, or any act of hostility against the United States or any citizen thereof, on the high seas, under color of any commission of any foreign Prince or State, or on pretence of authority from any person, such offender shall, notwithstanding the pretence of any such authority, be deemed, adjudged, and taken to be a pirate, felon, and robber, and on being convicted thereof shall suffer death." This section applies particularly to the citizens of the United States. Now, I contend that this section does not change the character of the offence. It differs only by stating that the commission shall not form a pretext. The words "piracy and robbery" explain the words "acts of hostility," which follow immediately afterwards. Where particular words are followed by general words, the latter are held as applying to persons and things of the same kind as those which precede. The coupling of words together shows that they are to be understood in the same sense. Take these two principles with the other principle, that penal statutes are to receive a strict interpretation. The general words of a penal statute must be restrained for the benefit of him against whom the penalty is inflicted. To the same effect is the case of _The United States_ vs. _Bevins_ (5 _Wheaton_): "Penal statutes, however, are taken strictly and literally only in point of defining and setting down the _crime_ and the _punishment_; and not literally in words that are but circumstances and conveyance in the putting of the case. "Thus, though by the statute 1 Ed. 6, C. 12, it was enacted that those who were convicted of stealing _horses_ should not have the benefit of clergy, the Judges conceived that this did not extend to him that should steal but one horse, and therefore procured a new Act for that purpose in the following year. "But upon the Statute of Gloucester, that gives the action of waste against him that holds _pro termino vitæ vel annorum_, if a man holds but for a year he is within the statute; while, if the law be that for a certain offence a man shall lose his right hand, and the offender hath had his right hand before cut off in the wars, he shall not lose his left hand, but the crime shall rather pass without the punishment which the law assigned than the letter of the law shall be extended. "A penal law, then, shall not be extended by equity; that is, things which do not come within the words shall not be brought within it by construction. "The law of England does not allow of constructive offences, or of arbitrary punishments. No man incurs a penalty unless the act which subjects him to it is clearly both within the spirit and the letter of the statute imposing such penalty.