his fellow-subjects since the whole tenor of conduct repels the belief of the traitorous intention charged by the indictment - my task is finished. I shall make no address to your passions. I will not remind you of the long and rigorous imprisonment he has suffered; I will not speak to you of his great youth, of his illustrious birth, and of his uniformly animated and generous zeal in Parliament for the Constitution of his country. Such topics might be useful in the balance; yet, even then, I should have trusted to the honest hearts of Englishmen to have felt them without excitation. At present, the plain and rigid rules of justice and truth are sufficient to entitle me to your verdict. PRONOUNCING SENTENCE FOR HIGH TREASON Arthur Alfred Lynch, otherwise Arthur Lynch, the jury have found you guilty of the crime of high treason, a crime happily so rare that in the present day a trial for treason seems to be almost an anachronism a thing of the past. The misdeeds which have been done in this case, and which have brought you to the lamentable pass in which you stand, must surely convince the most skeptical and apathetic of the gravity and reality of the crime. What was your action in the darkest hour of your country's fortunes, when she was engaged in the deadly struggle from which she has just emerged? You joined the ranks of your country's foes. Born in Australia, a land which has nobly shown its devotion to its parent country, you have indeed taken a different course from that which was adopted by her sons. You have fought against your country, not with it. You have sought, as far as you could, to dethrone Great Britain from her place among the nations, to make her name a byword and a reproach, a synonym for weakness and irresolution. Nor can I forget that you have shed the blood, or done your best to shed the blood, of your countrymen who were fighting for their country. How many wives have been made widows, how many children orphans, by what you and those who acted under your command have done, Heaven only knows! You thought it safe at that dark hour of the Empire's fate, when Ladysmith, when Kimberley, when Mafeking, were in the very jaws of deadly peril you thought it safe, no doubt, to lift the parricidal hand against your country. You thought she would shrink from the costly struggle wearied out by her gigantic efforts, and that, at the worst, a general peace would be made which would comprehend a general amnesty and cover up such acts as yours and save you from personal peril. You misjudged your country and failed to appreciate that, though slow to enter into a quarrel, however slow to take up arms, it has yet been her wont that in the quarrel she shall bear herself so that the opposer may beware of her, and that she is seldom so dangerous to her enemies as when the hour of national calamity has raised the dormant energies of her people-knit together every nerve and fiber of the body politic, and has made her sons determined to do all, to sacrifice all on behalf of the country that gave them birth. And against what a Sovereign and what a country did you lift your hand! A Sovereign the best beloved and most deeply honored of all the long line of English Kings and Queens, and whose lamented death was called back to my remembrance only yesterday as a fresh sorrow to many an English household. Against a country which has been the home of progress and freedom, and under whose beneficent sway, whenever you have chosen to stay within her dominions, you have enjoyed a liberty of person, a freedom of speech and action, such as you can have in no other country in Europe, and it is not too much to say in no other country in the world. The only -I will not say excuse, but palliation that I can find for conduct like yours is that it has been for some years past the fashion to treat lightly matters of this kind, so that men have been perhaps encouraged to play with sedition and to toy with treason, wrapt in a certain proud consciousness of strength begotten of the deep-seated and well-founded conviction that the loyalty of her people is supreme, and true authority in this country has slumbered or has treated with contemptuous indifference speeches and acts of sedition. It may be that you have been misled into the notion that, no matter what you did, so long as your conduct could be called a political crime, it was of no consequence. But it is one thing to talk sedition and to do small seditious acts, it is quite another thing to bear arms in the ranks of the foes of your country, and against it. Between the two the difference is immeasurable. But had you and those with whom you associated yourself succeeded, what fatal mischief might have been done to the great inheritance which has been bequeathed to us by our forefathers - - that inheritance of power which it must be our work to use nobly and for good things; an inheritance of influence which will be of little effect even for good unless backed by power, and of duty which cannot be effectually performed if our power be shattered and our influence impaired. He who has attempted to do his country such irreparable wrong must be prepared to submit to the sentence which it is now my duty to pronounce upon you. The sentence of this Court and it is pronounced in regard to each count of the indictment — is that you be taken hence to the place from which you came, and from thence to a place of execution, there to be hanged by the neck until you are dead. THE IMPEACHMENT OF ANDREW JOHNSON From the Official Records of the Trial in the United States Senate, 1868 BY GEORGE S. BOUTWELL Andrew Johnson has disregarded and violated the laws and Constitution of his own country. Under his administration the government has not been strengthened, but weakened. Its reputation and influence at home and abroad have been injured and diminished. Ten States of this Union are without law, without security, without safety; public order everywhere violated, public justice nowhere respected; and all in consequence of the evil purposes and machinations of the President. Forty millions of people have been rendered anxious and uncertain as to the preservation of public peace and the perpetuity of the institutions of freedom in this country. All classes are oppressed by the private and public calamities which he has brought upon them. They appeal to you for relief. The nation waits in anxiety for the conclusion of these proceedings. Forty millions of people, whose interest in public affairs is in the wise and just administration of the laws, look to this tribunal as a sure defense against the encroachments of a criminally minded Chief Magistrate. Will any one say that the heaviest judgment which you can render is any adequate punishment for these crimes? Your office is not punishment, but to secure the safety of the republic. But human tribunals are inadequate to punish those criminals who, as rulers or magistrates, by their example, conduct, policy, and crimes, become the scourge of communities and nations. No picture, no power of the imagination, can illustrate or conceive the suffering of the poor but loyal people of the South. A patriotic, virtuous, law-abiding chief magistrate would have healed the wounds of war, soothed private and public sorrows, protected the weak, encouraged the strong, and lifted from the Southern people the burdens which now are greater than they can bear. Travelers and astronomers inform us that in the southern heavens, near the southern cross, there is a vast space which the uneducated call the hole in the sky, where the eye of man, with the aid of the powers of the telescope, has been unable to discover nebulæ, or asteroid, or comet, or planet, or star, or sun. In that dreary, cold, dark region of space, which is only known to be less than infinite by the evidences of creation elsewhere, the Great Author of celestial mechanism has left the chaos which was in the beginning. If this earth were capable of the sentiments and emotions of justice and virtue, which in human mortal beings are the evidences and the pledge of our Divine origin and immortal destiny, it would heave and throw, with the energy of the elemental forces of nature, and project this enemy of two races of men into that vast region, there forever to exist in a solitude eternal as life, or as the absence of life, emblematical of, if not really, that "outer darkness" of which the Savior of man spoke in warning to those who are the enemies of themselves, of their race, |