would affirm to be their deserts.  But the case is far different when it affects persons who are only suspected, or against whom the evidence is weak and imperfect; for, if citizens may be arraigned and convicted for so grievous an offense as this upon insufficient evidence, every one will feel his own personal safety involved, and the tendency would be to intensify public feelings against the whole process of the trial.  It would be felt and argued that they had been condemned upon evidence that would not have convicted them in a civil court, and that they had been deprived, therefore, of the advantage, which they would have had for their defense.  Reproach and contumely upon the government would be the natural result, and the first occasion would arise in all history for such demonstrations as would be sure to follow the condemnation of mere citizens, and particularly of a woman, upon evidence on which an acquittal would follow in a civil court.  It is, therefore, not only a matter of the highest concern to the accused themselves, as a question of personal and private right, but also of great importance upon considerations of general public utility and policy, that the results of this trial, as affecting each of the accused, among them Mrs. Surratt, shall be rigidly held within the bounds and limitations that would control in the premises, if the parties were on trial in a civil court upon an indictment equivalent to the charges and specifications here.  Conceding, as we have said, the jurisdiction for the purpose of this branch of the argument, we hold to the principle first enunciated as the one great, all-important, and controlling rule that is to guide the commission in the findings they are now about to make.  In order to apply this principle to the case of our client, we do not propose to range through the general rules of evidence with a view to seeing how they square with the facts as proven against her.  In the examination of the evidence in detail, many of these must from necessity be briefly alluded to; but there is only one of them to which we propose in this place to advert specifically, and that is the principle that may be justly said to lie at the foundation of all the criminal law—­a principle so just, that it seems to have sprung from the brain of Wisdom herself, and so undoubted and universal as to stand upon the recognition of all the times and all the mighty intellects through and by which the common law has been built up.  We allude, of course, to that principle which declares that “every man is held to be innocent until he shall be proven guilty”—­a principle so natural that it has fastened itself upon the common reason of mankind, and been immemorially adopted as a cardinal doctrine in all courts of justice worthy of the name.  It is by reason of this great underlying legal tenet that we are in possession of the rule of law, administered by all the courts, which, in mere technical expression, may be termed “the presumption of innocence in