sentence of the district court of the United States for a contempt. A habeas corpus is not a writ of error. It cannot bring a case before us in such a manner that we can exercise any kind of appellate jurisdiction in it.

On a habeas corpus, the judgment even of a subordinate state court cannot be disregarded, reversed, or set aside, however clearly we may perceive it to be erroneous, and however plain it may be that we ought to reverse it if it were before us on appeal or writ of error. We can only look at the record to see whether a judgment exists, and have no power to say whether it is right or wrong. It is conclusively presumed to be right until it is regularly brought up for revision. We decided this three years ago, at Sunbury, in a case which we all thought one of much hardship. But the rule is so familiar, so universally acknowledged, and so reasonable in itself that it requires only to be stated. It applies with still greater force, or, at least, for much stronger reasons, to the decisions of the federal courts. Over them we have no control at all, under any circumstances, or by any process that could be devised. Those tribunals belong to a different judicial system from ours. They administer a different code of laws, and are responsible to a different sovereignty. The district court of the United States is as independent of us as we are of it,-as independent as the supreme court of the United States is of either. What the law and the constitution have forbidden us to do directly on writ of error, we, of course, cannot do indirectly by habeas corpus. But the petitioner's counsel have put his case on the ground that the whole proceeding against him in the district court was coram non judice, null, and void. It is certainly true that a void judgment may be regarded as no judgment at all, and every judgment is void which clearly appears on its own face to have been pronounced by a court having no jurisdiction or authority in the subject-matter; for instance, if a federal court should convict and sentence a citizen for libel, or if a state court, having no jurisdiction except in civil pleas, should try an indictment for a crime, and convict the party, in these cases the judgments would be wholly void. If the petitioner can bring himself within this principle, then there is no judgment against him, he is wrongfully imprisoned, and we must order him to be brought out and discharged. What is he detained for? The answer is easy and simple. The commitment shows that he was tried, found guilty, and sentenced for contempt of court, and nothing else. He is now confined in execution of that sentence, and for no other cause. This was a distinct and substantive offense against the authority and government of the United States. Does anybody doubt the jurisdiction of the district court to punish contempt? Certainly not. All courts have this power, and must necessarily have it; oth

erwise, they could not protect themselves from insult, or enforce obedience to their process. Without it, they would be utterly powerless. The authority to deal with an offender of this class belongs exclusively to the court in which the offense is committed; and no other court, not even the highest, can interfere with its exercise, either by writ of error, mandamus, or habeas corpus. If the power be abused, there is no remedy but impeachment. The law was so held by this court in McLaughlin's Case, 5 Watts & S. 272, and by the supreme court of the United States in Kearney's Case, 7 Wheat. 38. It was solemnly settled, as part of the common law, in Crosby's Case, 3 Wils. 183, by a court in which sat two of the foremost jurists that England ever produced. We have not the smallest doubt that it is the law, and we must administer it as we find it. The only attempt ever made to disregard it was by a New York judge (Yates' Case, 4 Johns. 345), who was not supported by his brethren. This attempt was followed by all the evil and confusion which Blackstone and Kent and Story declared to be its necessary consequences. Whoever will trace that singular controversy to its termination will see that the chancellor and a majority of the supreme court, though once outvoted in the senate, were never answered. The senate itself yielded to the force of the truths which the supreme court had laid down so clearly, and the judgment of the court of errors in Yates' Case, 6 Johns. 503, was overruled by the same court the year afterwards in Yates v. Lansing, 9 Johns. 423, which grew out of the very same transaction and depended on the same principles. Still further reflection at a later period induced the senate to join the popular branch of the legislature in passing a statute which effectually prevents one judge from interfering by a habeas corpus with the judgment of another on a question of contempt. These principles being settled, it follows irresistibly that the district court of the United States had power and jurisdiction to decide what acts constitute a contempt against it, to determine whether the petitioner had been guilty of contempt, and to inflict upon him the punishment which, in its opinion, he ought to suffer. If we fully believed the petitioner to be innocent, -if we were sure that the court which convicted him misunderstood the facts or misapplied the law,-still we could not re-examine the evidence, or rejudge the justice of the case, without grossly disregarding what we know to be the law of the land. The judge of the district court decided the question on his own constitutional responsibility. Even if he could be shown to have acted tyrannically or corruptly, he could be called to answer for it only in the senate of the United States.

"But the counsel of the petitioner go behind the proceedings in which he was convicted, and argue that the sentence for con

tempt is void, because the court had no jurisdiction of a certain other matter which it was investigating, or attempting to investigate, when the contempt was committed. We find a judgment against him in one case; and he complains about another, in which there is no judgment. He is suffering for an offense against the United States, and he says he is innocent of any wrong to a particular individual. He is conclusively adjudged guilty of contempt; and he tells us that the court has no jurisdiction to restore Mr. Wheeler's slaves. It must be remembered that contempt of court is a specific criminal offense. It is punished sometimes by indictment, and sometimes in a summary proceeding, as it was in this case. In either mode of trial, the adjudication against the offender is a conviction, and the commitment in consequence is execution. 7 Wheat. 38. This is well settled, and, I believe, has never been doubted. Certainly the learned counsel for the petitioner have not denied it. The contempt may be connected with some particular cause, or it may consist in misbehavior which has a tendency to obstruct the administration of justice generally. When it is committed in a pending cause, the proceeding to punish it is a proceeding by itself. It is not entitled in the cause pending, but on the criminal side. U. S. v. Wayne, Wall. Sr. 134, Fed. Cas. No. 16.654. The record of a conviction for contempt is as distinct from the matter under investigation when it was committed as an indictment for perjury is from the cause in which the false oath was taken. Can a person, convicted of perjury, ask us to deliver him from the penitentiary on showing that the oath on which the perjury is assigned was taken in a cause of which the court had no jurisdiction? Would any judge in the commonwealth listen to such a reason for treating the sentence as void? If, instead of swearing falsely, he refuses to be sworn at all, and he is convicted, not of perjury, but of contempt, the same rule applies, and with a force precisely equal. If it be really true that no contempt can be committed against a court while it is inquiring into a matter beyond its jurisdiction, and if the fact was so in this case, then the petitioner had a good defense, and he ought to have made it on his trial. To make it after conviction is too late. To make it here is to produce it before the wrong tribunal.

Every judgment must be conclusive until reversed. Such is the character, nature, and essence of all judgments. If it be not conclusive, it is not a judgment. A court must either have power to settle a given question finally and forever, so as to preclude any further inquiry upon it, or else it has no power to make any decision at all. To say that a court may determine a matter, and that another court may regard the same matter afterwards as open and undetermined, is an absurdity in terms. It is most especially necessary that convictions for contempt in one court should be final, conclusive,

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and free from re-examination by other courts on habeas corpus. If the law were not so, our judicial system would break to pieces in a month. Courts totally unconnected with each other would be coming in constant collision. The inferior courts would revise all the decisions of the judges placed over and above them. A party unwilling to be tried in this court need only defy our authority, and, if we commit him, take out his habeas corpus before an inferior judge of his own choosing, and; if that judge is of opinion that we ought not to try him, there is an end of the case. This doctrine is so plainly against the reason of the thing that it would be wonderful, indeed, if any authority for it could be found in the books. There is none, except the overruled decision of Mr. Justice Spencer of New York, already referred to, and some efforts of the same kind to control the other courts, made by Sir Edward Coke, in the king's bench, which are now universally admitted to have been illegal, as well as rude and intemperate. On the other hand, we have all the English judges, and all our own, declaring their want of power to interfere with or control one another in this way. I will content myself by simply referring to some of the books in which it is established that the conviction of contempt is a separate proceeding, and is conclusive of every fact which might have been urged on the trial for contempt, and, among others, want of jurisdiction to try the cause in which the contempt was committed: 4 Johns. 325 et seq.; the opinion of Chief Justice Kent on pages 370 to 375; 6 Johns. 503; 9 Johns. 423; People v. Nevins, 1 Hill, 170; State v. Woodfin, 27 N. C. 199; Ex parte Summers, Id. 153; In re Smethurst, 2 Sandf. 724; Lockwood v. State, 1 Ind. 160; State v. Tipton, 1 Blackf. 166; State v. Johnson, 25 Miss. 836; Com. v. Deacon, 2 Wheeler, Cr. Cas. 1; 14 Adol. & El. 558. These cases will speak for themselves, but I may remark, as to the last one, that the very same objection was made there and here. The party was convicted of contempt in not obeying the decree. He claimed his discharge on habeas corpus because the chancellor had no jurisdiction to make the decree, being interested in the cause himself. But the court of queen's bench held that, if that was a defense, it should have been made on the trial for contempt, and the conviction was conclusive. We cannot but choose to hold the same rule here. Any other would be a violation of the law, which is established and sustained by all authority and all reason. But certainly the want of jurisdiction alleged in this case would not even have been a defense on the trial. The proposition that a court is powerless to punish for disorderly conduct or disobedience of its process, in a case which it ought ultimately to dismiss for want of jurisdiction, is not only unsupported by judicial authority, but we think it is new, even as an argument at the bar. We ourselves have heard many cases through and

through before we became convinced that it was our duty to remit the parties to another tribunal; but we never thought that our process could be defied in such cases more than in others. There are some proceedings in which the want of jurisdiction would be seen at the first blush, but there are others in which the court must inquire into all the facts before it can possibly know whether it has jurisdiction or not. Any one who obstructs or baffles a judicial investigation for that purpose is unquestionably guilty of a crime, for which he may and ought to be tried, convicted, and punished. Suppose a local action to be brought in the wrong county; this is a defense to the action, but a defense which must be made out like any other. While it is pending, neither a party, nor an officer, nor any other person can safely insult the court or resist its order. The court may not have had power to decide upon the merits of the case, but it has undoubted power to try whether the wrong was done within its jurisdiction or not. Suppose Mr. Williamson to be called before the circuit court of the United States as a witness in a trial for murder, alleged to be committed on the high seas; can he refuse to be sworn, and at his trial for contempt justify himself on the ground that the murder was in fact committed within the limits of a state, and therefore triable only in a state court? If he can, he can justify perjury for the same reason. But such a defense for either crime has never been heard of since the beginning of the world. Much less can it be shown, after conviction, as a ground for declaring the sentence void."

Mr. Justice Lowrie, in the same case and in a separate opinion, makes use of the following language:

"I have not been able to doubt that this court is in many cases bound to exercise its judgment as to the propriety of granting the writ before allowing it to issue. Notwithstanding the words of the act which impose a penalty for refusing the writ, we are not forbidden to interpret the law. And the necessity of presenting a petition to the court or to a judge thereof; of stating therein whether the prisoner was detained on criminal or on civil process, or neither; of producing the warrant of committal, or accounting for not doing so; the fact that traitors and murderers and fugitives from the justice of other states are excluded from the benefit of the act, and that the writ was not intended for the relief of convict criminals (Cro. Car. 168; 1 Salk. 348), and was not extended to them by our act,-all these matters show plainly enough that the judge or court is not exercising a mere ministerial function in granting the writ. On any other supposition, there is no reason at all for applying to the court; for the prothonotary could grant it as well. And no one can examine the provisions of Magna Charta, the petition of right (3 Car. I.), the statute repealing the star cham

ber court (16 Car. I. c. 10), the habeas corpus act of 31 Car. I. and ours of 1785, and the numerous kindred statutes to which that investigation will lead him, without perceiving that a free and open court, and a full and open trial before the superior judges by due course of law, have always been regarded as the best guaranty of the liberty of the citizen. He will see, moreover, very plainly, that the habeas corpus is only a means by which this end is to be secured, so that no ignorance or tyranny of king, or king's counsel, or minister, or of mere local and inferior courts, dependent on and governed by local customs, or of justices of the peace, shall imprison a man without a chance of bail, or a hope of obtaining a speedy trial by the law of the land. See Com. v. Sheriff, 7 Watts & S. 108."

The above cases cannot here be disposed of on the ground that "this was not a case where the applicant was imprisoned, but involved the question of the right to his freedom of one held as a slave," because the former (Williamson Case) surely undertakes the discussion of habeas corpus fully, and cites with approval the latter case (Ex parte Lawrence, 5 Bin. 304).

The case of Ex parte Lawrence, 5 Bin. 304, referred to in the foregoing opinion of Justice Black, is as follows:

"Phillips, on behalf of Ann Lawrence, petitioned the court for a habeas corpus under the act of 1785 to one Joseph Vogdes, to bring up the body of Adam Lawrence, then in his custody as a slave, whereas, according to the suggestion, he was free. It was stated by the counsel that the case had been already heard upon a habeas corpus by the common pleas of Philadelphia county, who remanded the prisoner; and that there was no new evidence to lay before this court.

"Per Curiam. We do not think that the act of assembly obliges this court to grant a habeas corpus where the case has been already heard upon the same evidence by another court; and we do not think it expedient in this case, because it has been already heard upon the same evidence, and the party is not without remedy, as he may resort to a homine replegiando. The court are not, however, to be understood as saying that they have not authority to issue a habeas corpus in such a case, if they should think it expedient. Habeas corpus refused."

An interesting case, and one that directly passes upon many of the questions here involved, is the recent one of Brown v. Walker (1896) 161 U. S. 591, 16 Sup. Ct. 644, and I quote from the language of Mr. Justice Brown, of the United States supreme court, in that case: "This case involves an alleged incompatibility between that clause of the fifth amendment to the constitution which declares that no person shall be compelled in any criminal case to be a witness against himself' and Act Cong. Feb. 11, 1893. c. 83 (27 Stat. 443), which enacts that 'no

person shall be excused from attending and testifying or from producing books, papers, tariffs, contracts, agreements and documents before the interstate commerce commission, or in obedience to the subpoena of the commission, * * * on the ground or for the reason that the testimony or evidence, documentary or otherwise, required of him, may tend to criminate him or subject him to a penalty or forfeiture. But no person shall be prosecuted or subjected to any penalty or forfeiture for or on account of any transaction, matter, or thing concerning which he may testify, or produce evidence, documentary or otherwise, before said commission, or in obedience to its subpoena, or the subpoena of either of them, or in any such case or proceeding.' The act is supposed to have been passed in view of the opinion of this court in Counselman v. Hitchcock, 142 U. S. 547, 12 Sup. Ct. 195, to the effect that section 860 of the Revised Statutes, providing that . no evidence given by a witness shall be used against him, his property or estate, in any manner, in any court of the United States, in any criminal proceeding, did not afford that complete protection to the witness which the amendment was intended to guaranty." After giving the gist of the Counselman decision, and referring to statutes giving immunity from prosecution, the court says: "In the latter case [Reg. v. Boyes, 1 Best & S. 311, 321] it was suggested, in answer to the production by the solicitor general of a pardon of the witness under the great seal, that by statute no such pardon under the great seal was pleadable to an impeachment by the commons in parliament; and it was insisted that this was a sufficient reason for holding that the privilege of the witness still existed, upon the ground that, although protected by the pardon against every other form of prosecution, the witness might possibly be subjected to parliamentary impeachment. was also contended in that case, as it is in the one under consideration, that a bare possibility of legal peril was sufficient to entitle a witness to protection; nay, further, that the witness was the sole judge as to whether his evidence would bring him into the danger of the law, and that the statement of his belief to that effect, if not manifestly made mala fide, would be received as conclusive. It was held, however, by Lord Chief Justice Cockburn, that 'to entitle a party called as a witness to the privilege of silence the court must see, from the evidence which the witness is called to give, that there is reasonable ground to apprehend danger to the witness from his being compelled to answer,' although, if the fact of the witness being in danger be once made to appear, great latitude should be allowed to him in judging for himself of the effect of any particular question. Further than this,' said the chief justice, 'we are of the opinion that the danger to be apprehended must be real and appreciable, with reference to the ordinary opera

It

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tion of law, in ordinary course of things, not a danger of an imaginary and unsubstantial character, having reference to some extraordinary and barely possible contingency, so improbable that no reasonable man would suffer it to influence his conduct. We think that a merely remote and naked possibility, out of the ordinary course of the law, and such as no reasonable man would be affected by, should not be suffered to obstruct the administration of justice. The object of the law is to afford to a party, called upon to give evidence in a proceeding inter alios, protection against being brought by means of his own evidence within the penalties of the law. But it would be to convert a salutary protection into a means of abuse if it were to be held that a mere imaginary possibility of danger, however remote and improbable, was sufficient to justify the withholding of evidence essential to the ends of justice.' All of the cases above cited proceed upon the idea that the prohibition against his being compelled to testify against himself presupposes a legal detriment to the witness arising from the exposure. As the object of the first eight amendments to the constitution was to incorporate into the fundamental law of the land certain principles of natural justice which had become permanently fixed in the jurisprudence of the mother country, the construction given to those principles by the English courts is cogent evidence of what they were designed to secure, and of the limitations that should be put upon them. This is but another application of the familiar rule that when one state adopts the laws of another, it is also presumed to adopt the known and settled construction of those laws by the courts of the state from which they were taken,”-citing authorities. "The danger of extending the principle announced in Counselman v. Hitchcock is that the privilege may be put forward for a sentimental reason, or for purely fanciful protection of the witness against an imaginary danger, and for the real purpose of securing immunity to some third person, who is interested in concealing the facts to which he would testify. Every good citizen is bound to aid in the enforcement of the law, and has no right to permit himself, under the pretext of shielding his own good name, to be made the tool of others who are desirous of seeking shelter behind his privilege." Then follows, in the opinion of the court, a discussion of the immunity afforded by the act first described, and this language is used: "It is entirely true that the statute does not purport, nor is it possible for any statute, to shield the witness from the personal disgrace or opprobrium attaching to the exposure of his crime; but, as we have already observed, the authorities are numerous and very nearly uniform to the effect that, if the proposed testimony is material to the issue on trial, the fact that the testimony may tend to degrade the witness in public