The Jury have a great and solemn duty to discharge on this occasion. They have the great and solemn duty to discharge of forgetting, if possible, that they are Americans, and of thinking, for the moment, that they have been transformed into subjects of other lands; of forgetting that there is a North or a South, an East or a West, and of remembering only that these twelve men are in peril of their lives, and that this Jury is to judge whether they have feloniously and piratically, with a criminal intent, done the act for which it is claimed their lives are forfeited to their country. I wish to dispel from the minds of the Jury, at the outset of this case, an illusion which has been attempted to be produced on them, with no improper motive, I am sure, by the counsel who opened the case on the part of the Government--that this trial is a mere matter of form. I tell you, gentlemen, that it is a trial involving the lives of twelve men, and this Jury are bound to assume, from the beginning to the end of the case, that if their verdict shall pronounce these men guilty of the crime of piracy, with which they are charged, every one of them will as surely terminate his life on the scaffold, as the sun will rise on the morrow of the day on which the verdict shall be pronounced. We have nothing to do with what the Government in its justice and clemency may see fit to do after that verdict has been pronounced. We are bound to believe that the Government does not put these men upon their trial with an intention to make the verdict, if it shall be one of guilty, a mere idle mockery. I, for one, while I love my country, and wish its Government to enjoy the respect of the whole world, would not be willing to believe that it would perform a solemn farce of that kind; and, gentlemen, as you value the peace and repose of your own consciences, you will, in the progress of this trial, from its beginning to its end, look on it in this light, and in none other.