ness of your citizenship, or the sovereignty of your State? Rather may the child forget its parent, and smite with unnatural hand the author of its being." This was his appeal for sympathy : " For my client I avow every sympathy. Fallen and undone, broken and ruined as he is by the fall, yet, from the depths of the fearful chasm in which he lies, I hear the common call which the wretched make for sympathy more clearly than if it issued from the loft iest pyramid of wealth and power. If He, who made the earth, and hung the sun and moon and stars on high to give it light, and created man a joint heir of eternal wealth, and put within him an immortal spark of the celestial flame which surrounds His throne, could remember mercy when executing jus tice when His whole plan of divine govern ment was assailed and deranged; when His law was set at defiance and violated; when the purity of Eden had been defiled by the presence and counsels of the serpent, — why, so can I, and can you, when the wrong and the crime stand confessed, and every atonement is made to the majesty of the law which the prisoner has in his power to make." Note his concluding appeal to the jury: "Shall I go home and say that in justice you remembered not justice to him? Leave the door of clemency open; do not shut it by a wholesale conviction. Remember that death is terrible — terrible at any time, and in any form. But when to the frightful mien of the grim monster, when to the chill vis age of the glass and scythe is added the hated, dreaded specter of the gibbet,* we turn shuddering from the accumulated hor ror. God spare this boy, and those who love him, from such a scene of woe. I part from you now, and most likely forever. When we next meet — when I next look into your faces and you in mine — it will be
in the land and before the Tribunal where the only plea that will save you and me from a worse fate than awaits this prisoner, will be mercy. Charity is the paramount virtue; all else is as ' sounding brass and tinkling cymbal.' ' Charity suffereth long and is kind.' Forbid it not to come into your de liberations; and, when your last hour comes, the memory that you allowed it to plead for your erring brother, John E. Cook, will brighten your passage-way over the dark river, and rise by your side as an interceding angel in that day, when your trial as well as his shall be determined by a just but merci ful God." Mr. Voorhees was the leading counsel in. the trial of Mary Harris, tried in one of the courts of the District of Columbia, in 1865, for the murder of Dr. A. J. Burroughs. Burroughs was in the service of the govern ment. He was twenty years her senior, and they had known each other since she was a child of ten. They were engaged, when he, without the least warning, in formed her by letter of his intended im mediate marriage to another. Shortly be fore this letter he had attempted to ensnare her into a house of ill-fame, in order that he might have an excuse to desert her, but his plans failed, she not being aware of his evil intention. Some time after receiving his announcement of his intended marriage to another, she went to Washington and shot him in the Treasury Building. The defense was insanity. The whole force of the gov ernment was thrown into the prosecution. The jury was out only five minutes; and returned a verdict for the defendant. Voorhees' speech occupied several hours in its delivery. Perhaps it is his greatest speech. The defendant evoked his sym pathy, and her pitiful condition drew forth his greatest oratorical powers. Here is a passage, and from the time of its delivery,
