out of the transportation statute, and to convert it into a case of stealing?  He has, to be sure, indulged in some very harsh epithets applied to this prisoner,—­epithets very similar to those which Lord Coke indulged in on the trial of Sir Walter Raleigh, and which drew out on the part of that prisoner a memorable retort.  My client is not a Raleigh; but neither, I must be permitted to say, is the District Attorney a Lord Coke.  I should be sorry to have it go abroad that we cannot try a man for an offence of this sort without calling him a liar, a rogue, a wretch. [The District Attorney here interrupted, with a good deal of warmth.  He insisted that he did not address the prisoner, but the jury, and that it was his right to call the attention of the jury to the evidence proving the prisoner to be a liar, rogue and wretch.]

Carlisle—­I do not dispute the learned gentleman’s right.  It is a matter of taste; but with you, gentlemen of the jury, these harsh epithets are not to make the difference of a hair.  You are to look at the evidence; and where is the evidence that the prisoner seduced and enticed these slaves?

“It may happen to any man to have a runaway slave in his premises, and even in his employment.  It happened to me to have in my employ a runaway,—­one of the best servants, by the way, I ever had.  He told me he was free, and I employed him as such.  If I had happened to have taken him to Baltimore, there would have been a complete similitude to the case at bar, and, according to the District Attorney’s logic, I might have been indicted for stealing.  Because I had him with me, I am to be presumed to have enticed him from his master!  As to the particular circumstances under which he came into my employment, I might have been wholly unable to show them.  Is it not possible to suppose a great number of circumstances under which these slaves of Houver left their master’s service and came on board the Pearl, without any agency on the part of this prisoner?  Now, the government might positively disprove and exclude forty such suppositions; but, so long as one remained which was not excluded, you cannot find a verdict of conviction.  The government is to prove that the prisoner enticed and seduced these negroes, and you have no right to presume he did so unless every other possible explanation of the case is positively excluded by the testimony.  Is it so extravagant a supposition that Mr. Foote’s speech, and the other torch-light speeches heretofore alluded to, heard by these slaves, or communicated to them, might have so wrought upon their minds as to induce them to leave their masters?  I don’t say that they had any right to suppose that these declamations about universal emancipation had any reference to them.  I am a southern man, and I hold to the southern doctrine.  I admit that there is no inconsistency between perfect civil liberty and holding people of another race in domestic servitude.  But then it is natural