repeated the words of the great jurist, then 200 years old: "Hearing the clanking of chains, though no complaint was made to him, he said, 'I should like to know why the prisoner is brought in ironed. Let them be instantly knocked off. When prisoners are tried they should stand at their ease.'" Then, characterizing the claim, that martial law prevailing in the District of Columbia therefore warranted the Commission, as alike indefensible and dangerous, and at the same time irrelevant because martial law had never been proclaimed and the civil courts were in the full and undisturbed exercise of all their functions, the counsel drove this point home as follows: "We learn, and the fact is doubtless true, that one of the parties, the very chief of the alleged conspiracy, has been indicted, and is about to be tried before one of those courts. If he, the alleged head and front of the conspiracy, is to be and can be so tried, upon what ground of right, of fairness or of policy, can the parties who are charged to have been his mere instruments be deprived of the same mode of trial?" At the close of his speech he recurs to the warning that the President's command can furnish no justification to the members of the tribunal. If their function were only to act as aides to the President to enable him to discharge his prerogative of punishment, and is to that extent legal, then it is only so because the President might have dispensed with the Court altogether, and ordered the punishment of the culprits without any formal trial. No, he warned them, in the most courtly and courteous manner, they could not shield themselves behind the President. "Responsibility to personal danger can never alarm soldiers who have faced * * * death on the battle-field. But there is a responsibility that every gentleman, be he soldier or citizen, will constantly hold before him and make him ponder--responsibility to the constitution and laws of his country and an intelligent public opinion--and prevent his doing anything knowingly that can justly subject him to the censure of either. I have said that your responsibility is great. If the Commission under which you act is void and confers no authority, whatever you may do may involve the most serious personal liability." He then cited the case of Governor Wall, hung in London in 1802 for murder--a soldier, under his government in the island of Goree, having been whipped to death by sentence of a regimental court-martial, twenty years before. "In that instance want of jurisdiction in the court-martial was held to be fatal to its judgment as a defense for the death that ensued under it. In this, if the Commission has no jurisdiction, its judgment for the same reason will be of no avail, either to Judges, Secretary of War, or President, if either shall be called to a responsibility for what may be done under it."