“Therefore all things whatsoever ye would that men should do to you, do ye even so unto them; for this is the law and the prophets.”

God has not only given us life, but he has filled the world with everything to make life desirable; and when we sit down to determine the taking away of that which we did not give, and which, when taken away, we cannot restore, we consider a subject the most solemn and momentous within the range of human thought and human action.

Profoundly impressed with the innocence of our client, we enter upon the last duty in her case with the heartfelt prayer that her honorable judges may enjoy the satisfaction of not having a single doubt left on their minds in granting her an acquittal, either as to the testimony affecting her, or by the surrounding circumstances of the case.

The first point that naturally arises in the presentation of the defense of our client is that which concerns the plea that has been made to the jurisdiction of the commission to try her—­a plea which by no means implies anything against the intelligence, fairness, or integrity of the brilliant and distinguished officers who compose the court, but merely touches the question of the right of this tribunal, under the authority by which it is convoked.  This branch of her case is left to depend upon the argument already submitted by her senior counsel, the grande decus columenque of his profession, and which is exhaustive of the subject on which it treats.  Therefore, in proceeding to the discussion of the merits of the case against her, the jurisdiction of the court, for the sake of argument, may be taken as conceded.

But, if it be granted that the jurisdiction is complete, the next preliminary inquiry naturally is as to the principles of evidence by which the great mass of accumulated facts is to be analyzed and weighed in the scales of justice and made to bias the minds of her judges; and it may be here laid down as a concessum in the case, that we are here in this forum, constrained and concluded by the same process, in this regard, that would bind and control us in any other court of civil origin having jurisdiction over a crime such as is here charged.  For it is asserted in all the books that court-martial must proceed, so far as the acceptance and the analysis of evidence is concerned, upon precisely those reasonable rules of evidence which time and experience, ab antiquo, surviving many ages of judicial wisdom, have unalterably fixed as unerring guides in the administration of the criminal law.  Upon this conceded proposition it is necessary to consume time by the multiplication of references.  We are content with two brief citations from works of acknowledged authority.

In Greenleaf it is laid down:—­

“That courts-martial are bound, in general, to observe the rules of the law of evidence by which the courts of criminal jurisdiction are governed.” (3 Greenleaf, section 467.)