Besides, I must honestly tell you that I could not vote for, or countenance in any way, a statute which stigmatizes with the crime of piracy these men whom an act of Parliament had previously put out of the protection of the law.  When the legislature of this kingdom had ordered all their ships and goods, for the mere new-created offence of exercising trade, to be divided as a spoil among the seamen, of the navy,—­to consider the necessary reprisal of an unhappy, proscribed, interdicted people, as the crime of piracy, would have appeared, in any other legislature than ours, a strain of the most insulting and most unnatural cruelty and injustice.  I assure you I never remember to have heard of anything like it in any time or country.

The second professed purpose of the act is to detain in England for trial those who shall commit high treason in America.

That you may be enabled to enter into the true spirit of the present law, it is necessary, Gentlemen, to apprise you that there is an act, made so long ago as in the reign of Henry the Eighth, before the existence or thought of any English colonies in America, for the trial in this kingdom of treasons committed out of the realm.  In the year 1769 Parliament thought proper to acquaint the crown with their construction of that act in a formal address, wherein they entreated his Majesty to cause persons charged with high treason in America to be brought into this kingdom for trial.  By this act of Henry the Eighth, so construed and so applied, almost all that is substantial and beneficial in a trial by jury is taken away from the subject in the colonies.  This is, however, saying too little; for to try a man under that act is, in effect, to condemn him unheard.  A person is brought hither in the dungeon of a ship’s hold; thence he is vomited into a dungeon on land, loaded with irons, unfurnished with money, unsupported by friends, three thousand miles from all means of calling upon or confronting evidence, where no one local circumstance that tends to detect perjury can possibly be judged of;—­such a person may be executed according to form, but he can never be tried according to justice.

I therefore could never reconcile myself to the bill I send you, which is expressly provided to remove all inconveniences from the establishment of a mode of trial which has ever appeared to me most unjust and most unconstitutional.  Far from removing the difficulties which impede the execution of so mischievous a project, I would heap new difficulties upon it, if it were in my power.  All the ancient, honest, juridical principles and institutions of England are so many clogs to check and retard the headlong course of violence and oppression.  They were invented for this one good purpose, that what was not just should not be convenient.  Convinced of this, I would leave things as I found them.  The old, cool-headed, general law is as good as any deviation dictated by present heat.