Sir, these considerations have great weight with me when I find
things so circumstanced, that I see the same party at once a civil litigant
against me in point of right and a culprit before me, while I sit as a criminal
judge on acts of his whose moral quality is to be decided upon the merits of
that very litigation. Men are every now and then put, by the complexity of human
affairs, into strange situations; but justice is the same, let the judge be in
what situation he will.
There is, Sir, also a circumstance which convinces me that this mode of criminal
proceeding is not, at least in the present stage of our contest, altogether
expedient; which is nothing less than the conduct of those very persons who have
seemed to adopt that mode by lately declaring a rebellion in Massachusetts Bay,
as they had formerly addressed to have traitors brought hither, under an Act of
Henry the Eighth, [Footnote: 40] for trial. For though rebellion is declared, it
is not proceeded against as such, nor have any steps been taken towards the
apprehension or conviction of any individual offender, either on our late or our
former Address; but modes of public coercion have been adopted, and such as have
much more resemblance to a sort of qualified hostility towards an independent
power than the punishment of rebellious subjects.
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