From the sixteenth to the twenty-seventh of June the time was consumed by the summing up of the several counsel for the prisoners on the facts disclosed by the evidence; and on the last mentioned day and the succeeding one, Special Judge-Advocate Bingham delivered his address in answer to all the foregoing pleas, both as to the jurisdiction of the Court and also as to the merits of the case. This long, carefully prepared and yet impassioned speech may be fairly considered as embodying the very proof-charge of the prosecution. Indeed, under the rules of military procedure, it occupies the place and performs the functions of the judge's charge in the common-law courts. As such, it deserves a closer analysis and a more extended examination than can be given to it here. The briefest and most cursory review, however, will suffice to show its tone and temper. After a solemn asseveration of his desire to be just to the accused, and a warning to the Court that "a wrongful and illegal conviction or a wrongful and illegal acquittal * * * would impair somewhat the security of every man's life and shake the stability of the Republic," the learned advocate specifically declares, that the charge "is not simply the crime of murdering a human being" but a "combination of atrocities," committed as charged upon the record, "in pursuance of a treasonable conspiracy entered into by the accused with one John Wilkes Booth, and John H. Surratt, upon the instigation of Jefferson Davis, Jacob Thompson, George N. Sanders and others, with intent thereby to aid the existing rebellion and subvert the constitution and laws of the United States." A denunciation of the Rebellion as "itself simply a criminal conspiracy and a gigantic assassination"; the following glowing period--"Now that their battalions of treason are broken and flying before the victorious legions of the republic, the chief traitors in this great crime against your government secretly conspire with their hired confederates to achieve by assassination what they in vain attempt by wager of battle";--and the unequivocal announcement that "it is for this secret conspiracy in the interest of the rebellion, formed at the instigation of the chief in that rebellion, and in pursuance of which the acts charged and specified are alleged to have been done, and with the intent laid, that the accused are upon trial": finish the exordium. The speaker then tackles the question of jurisdiction, which, he remarks by the way, "as the Court has already overruled the plea," he would pass over in silence, "but for the fact that a grave and elaborate argument has been made by the counsel for the accused, not only to show want of jurisdiction, but to arraign the President of the United States before the country and the world as a usurper of power over the lives and the liberties of the prisoners."