libel or lampoon the living, or to revile and calumniate the dead. I have no fears. The facts will speak for themselves. I have sat on this bench for many years. I cannot hope that my memory, like that of the great and illustrious men who have gone before me, will live in after ages; but I do hope it will live in the remembrance-nay, I venture to say the affectionate remembrance-of the generation before whom and with whom I have administered justice here. And if my name shall be traduced, if my conduct shall be reviled, if my integrity shall be questioned, I leave the protection of my judicial memory to the bar of England, my relations with whom have never, until this trial, been in the slightest degree unpleasantly disturbed, and whose support I may say has been the happiest part of my judicial life. Gentlemen, motives of favor and fear having been attempted to be brought to bear upon us, allow me to say that there is but one course to follow in the discharge of great public duties. A high and solemn sense of duty should be our only guide; a desire to do that duty honestly our first and ruling motive, before which all other considerations should give way. No man should be insensible to public opinion in discharging a public trust. No man should be insensible to the good opinion-aye, if you like, the applauseof his countrymen. But there is a consideration far higher than that,— the satisfaction of your own internal sense of duty, the satisfaction of your own consciences, in the consciousness that you are following the promptings of that still, small voice which never, if we listen honestly to its dictates, misleads or deceives us; that voice whose approval upholds us, even though men should condemn us, and whose approval is far more precious than the honor and applause we may derive, no matter from what source,-that voice whose approval makes our walk serene by day and our pillow smooth by night. Listen to that, and follow it, and do right, and care not for anything that may be thought or said or done without these walls. In this sacred temple of justice, such considerations as those by which it has been attempted to sway your minds ought to have, and can have, no place. You and I have only one thing to consider, it is the duty we have to discharge, and which we are bound to discharge, before God and man, with only one thought and one desire, which is to do it honestly, truly, and fearlessly, without regard to any consequences except the desire that that duty shall be properly done."

Among other causes celebres, in which his skill in summing up evidence is displayed to advantage, may be mentioned the Matlock will case, the Wainwright murder case, (a leading case on circumstantial evidence), the convent case of Saurin v. Starr, (an action by a Sister of Mercy against her Mother Superior), and Reg. v. Gurney (a celebrated case of fraud and conspiracy).

Cockburn was at his best in the exposition of those branches of the law which are most closely based upon human life and conduct. In Banks v. Goodfellow,' one of his most important efforts, both as to form and substance, he formulated the doctrine of partial insanity. By his opinions in Wason v. Walter, Campbell

1 L. R. 5 Q. B. 549.

L. R. 4 Q. B. 73.

v. Spottiswoode, Hunter v. Sharpe, and Reg. v. Calthorpe," he gave a permanent impulse to the law of libel as applied to the public press. In many other notable cases, among which may be mentioned Reg. v. Keyn, Phillips v. Eyre,' Castrique v. Imrie, Goodwin v. Robarts," Nugent v. Smith,10 and particularly in his charge to the grand jury before which it was sought to indict Col. Nelson and Lieut. Brand for their conduct in the Jamaica insurrection in 1865, he displayed many of the best qualities of judicial exposition. At a banquet given by the English bar in 1864 to M. Berryer, the distinguished French advocate, Cockburn gave lasting expression to the obligations of the lawyer to his profession. In the course of a speech made on that occasion, Brougham declared that "the first great quality of an advocate is to reckon everything subordinate to the interests of his client"; with respect to which, Cockburn, who followed, said:

"Much as I admire the abilities of M. Berryer, to my mind his crowning virtue-as it ought to be that of every advocate-is that he has, throughout his long career, conducted his cases with untarnished honor. The arms which an advocate wields he ought to use as a warrior, not as an assassin. He ought to uphold the interests of his client per fas and not per nefas. He ought to reconcile the interests of his client with the eternal interests of truth and justice."

That sentiment may well stand as Cockburn's epitaph.

ARGUMENT IN DEFENSE OF DANIEL MCNAUGHTON, IN THE CENTRAL CRIMINAL COURT, BEFORE CHIEF JUSTICE TINDAL, JUSTICES WILLIAMS AND COLERIDGE, AND A SPECIAL JURY, 1843.

STATEMENT.

On January 20, 1843, Daniel McNaughton shot Mr. Drummond, Sir Robert Peel's private secretary, whom he was supposed to have mistaken for Sir Robert Peel. He was promptly indicted for murder. At the trial, medical experts were called on behalf of the defense to prove the prisoner's insanity; and the court finding that the crown was not prepared with medical evidence to contradict such testimony, stopped the trial, and directed the jury to find the prisoner not guilty on the ground of insanity. The case was argued by Sir William Follett, the solicitor general, for the crown, and by Alexander E. Cockburn, Q. C., for the defendant. In consequence of this verdict, the house of lords subsequently took the opinion of all the judges upon the law with respect to insanity as a defense to crime.2

ARGUMENT.

May it Please Your Lordships, Gentlemen of the Jury: I rise to address you on behalf of the unfortunate prisoner at the bar, who stands charged with the awful crime of murder, under a feeling of anxiety so intense of responsibility so overwhelming that I feel almost borne down with the weight of my solemn and difficult task. Gentlemen, believe me when I assure you that I say this, not by way of idle or commonplace exordium, but as expressing the deep emotions by which my mind is agitated. I believe that you I know that the numerous professional brethren by whom I see myself surrounded-will understand me when I say that of all the positions in which, in the discharge of our various duties in the different relations of life, a man may be placed, none can be more painful or more paralyzing to the energies of the mind than that of an advocate to whom is committed the defense of a fellow being in a matter involving life and death, and who, while deeply convinced that the defense which he has to offer is founded in truth and justice, yet sees in the circumstances by which the case is surrounded that which makes him look forward with apprehension and trembling to the result. Gentlemen, if this were an ordinary case; if you had heard of it for the first time since you entered into that box; if the individual who has fallen a victim had been some obscure and unknown person, instead of one whose

1

State Tr. (N. S.) 847.

2 10 Clark & F. 200.

character, whose excellence, and whose fate had commanded the approbation, the love, and the sympathy of all,-I should feel no anxiety as to the issue of this trial. But alas! can I dare to hope that even among you, who are to pass in judgment on the accused, there can be one who has not brought to the judgment seat a mind imbued with preconceived notions on the case which is the subject of this important inquiry? In all classes of this great community -in every corner of this vast metropolis, from end to end, even to the remotest confines of this extensive empire-has this case been already canvassed, discussed, determined, and that with reference only to the worth of the victim, and the nature of the crime,—not with reference to the state or condition of him by whom that crime has been committed. And hence there has arisen in men's minds an insatiate desire of vengeance; there has gone forth a wild and merciless cry for blood, to which you are called upon this day to minister! Yet do I not complain. When I bear in mind how deeply the horror of assassination is stamped on the hearts of men, above all, on the characters of Englishmen,-and believe me, there breathes no one on God's earth by whom that crime is more abhorred than by him who now addresses you, and who, deeply deploring the loss, and acknowledging the goodness, dwelt upon with such touching eloquence by my learned friend, of him who in this instance has been its victim, would fain add, if it may be permitted, an humble tribute to the memory of him who has been taken from us,when I bear in mind, I say, these things, I will not give way to one single feeling; I will not breathe one single murmur of complaint or surprise at the passionate excitement which has pervaded the public mind on this unfortunate occasion. But I shall, I trust, be forgiven if I give utterance to the feelings of tear and dread by which, on approaching this case, I find my mind borne down, lest the fierce and passionate resentment to which this event has given rise may interfere with the due performance of those sacred functions which you are now called upon to discharge.

Yet, gentlemen, will I not give way to feelings of despair, or address you in the language of despondency. I am not unmindful of the presence in which I am to plead for the life of my client. I have before me British judges, to whom I pay no idle compliment when I say that they are possessed of all the qualities which can adorn their exalted station, or insure to the accused a fair, a patient, and an impartial hearing; I am addressing a British jury, -a tribunal to which truth has seldom been a suppliant in vain;

I stand in a British court, where Justice, with Mercy for her handmaid, sits enthroned on the noblest of her altars, dispelling, by the brightness of her presence, the clouds which occasionally gather over human intelligence, and awing into silence, by the holiness of her eternal majesty, the angry passions which at times intrude beyond the threshold of her sanctuary, and force their way even to the very steps of her throne. In the name of that eternal justice— in the name of that God whose great attribute we are taught that justice is I call upon you to enter upon the consideration of this case with minds divested of every prejudice, of every passion, of every feeling of excitement. In the name of all that is sacred and holy I call upon you calmly to weigh the evidence which will be brought before you, and to give your judgment according to that evidence. And if this appeal be not, as I know it will not be, made to you in vain, then, gentlemen, I know the result, and I shall look to the issue without fear or apprehension.

Gentlemen, my learned friend the solicitor general, in stating this case to you, anticipated, with his usual acuteness and accuracy the nature of the defense which would be set up. The defense upon which I shall rely will turn, not upon the denial of the act with which the prisoner is charged, but upon the state of his mind at the time he committed the act. There is no doubt, gentlemen, that, according to the law of England, insanity absolves a man from responsibility, and from the legal consequences which would otherwise attach to the violation of the law; and in this respect, indeed, the law of England goes no further than the law of every other civilized community on the face of the earth. It goes no further than what reason strictly prescribes; and, if it be not too presumptuous to scan the judgments of a higher tribunal, it may not be too much to believe and hope that Providence, when, in its inscrutable wisdom and its unfathomable councils, it thinks fit to lay upon a human being the heaviest and most appalling of all calamities to which, in this world of trial and suffering, human nature can be subjected, the deprivation of that reason which is man's only light and guide in the intricate and slippery paths of life, will absolve him from his responsibility to the laws of God, as well as to those of man. The law, then, takes cognizance of that disease which obscures the intellect, and poisons the very sources of thought and feeling in the human being; which deprives man of reason, and converts him into the similitude of the lower animal which bears down all the motives which usually stand as barriers around his conduct, and bring him within the operation of