Nor would the court permit the defendant to show, by proofs, which he declared on oath to have been unknown to him at the time of the empanelling of the jury, that an array of twelve men, summoned on venire by a deputy sheriff, were (or a considerable part of them at least) the same persons who had been selected by an attorney of this court, who assisted the officer in the service of the summons.

These and other matters, which I will not stop to enumerate, show that this trial, which has been carried through the forms of law, was destitute of the reality of justice, and was but a ceremony preceding conviction. That there is any precedent for it, in the most acrimonious period of the most excited party times in this country, I am not aware from any examination or recollection of its political history.

In a trial of an alleged political offence, involving the feelings of the whole community, and growing out of a condition of affairs which placed the whole people of the state on one side or the other of an exasperated controversy, the strictest and most sacred impartiality should have been observed in the most careful investigation both of law and fact by the jury, and in all the decisions and directions of the court. In what case should they have been more distrustful of the political bias of their own minds, more careful in all their deliberations, more earnest in the invocation of a strength above their own, that they might not only appear to be just, but do justice in a manner so above all suspicion, that the defendant, and all those with whom he is associated, might be satisfied that he had had his day in court, and that every requisition of the law had been observed and fulfilled. In how different a spirit were the proceedings of this trial conducted! And with what emotions must the defendant have listened to the declaration of one of your honors, that "in the hurry of this trial" they could not attend to the questions of

law, which he so earnestly pressed upon their immediate consideration, as vitally important to the righteous determination of his case!

The result of this trial, which your sentence is about to proclaim, is the perpetual imprisonment of the defendant, and his seclusion from the face of society, and from all communication with his fellow-men.

Is it too much to say that the object of his political opponents is the gratification of an insatiable spirit. of revenge, rather than the attainment of legal justice? They are also bent upon his political destruction, which results from the sentence of the court, in the deprivation of his political and civil rights. They aim also at a social annihilation, by his commitment to that tomb of the living, from which, in ordinary cases, those who emerge are looked upon as marked and doomed men, to be excluded from the reputable walks of life. But there my opponents and persecutors are destined to disappointment. The court may, through the consequences of their sentence, abridge the term of his existence here; they can annihilate his political rights; but more than this they cannot accomplish. The honest judgment of his friends and fellow-citizens, resting upon the truth of his cause, and faithful to the dictates of humanity and justice, will not so much regard the place to which he is consigned, as the causes which have led to his incarceration within its walls.

Better men have been worse treated than I have been, though not often in a better cause. In the service of that cause I have no right to complain that I am called upon to suffer hardships, whatever may be the estimate of the injustice which inflicts them.

All these proceedings will be reconsidered by that ultimate tribunal of public opinion, whose righteous decision will reverse all the wrongs which may be now committed, and place that estimate upon my actions to which they may be fairly entitled.

The process of this court does not reach the man within. The court cannot shake the convictions of the mind, nor the fixed purpose which is sustained by integrity of heart.

Claiming no exemptions from the infirmities which beset us all, and which may attend us in the prosecution of the most important enterprises, and, at the same time, conscious of the rectitude of my intentions, and of having acted from good motives in an attempt to promote the equality, and to establish the just freedom and interest of my fellow-citizens, I can regard with equanimity this last infliction of the court; nor would I, even at this extremity of the law, in view of the opinions which you entertain, and of the sentiments by which you are animated, exchange the place of a prisoner at the bar for a seat by your side upon the bench.

The sentence which you will pronounce, to the extent of the power and influence which this court can exert, is a condemnation of the doctrines of "76, and a reversal of the great principles which sustain and give vitality to our democratic republic, and which are regarded by the great body of our fellow-citizens as a portion of the birthright of a free people.

From this sentence of the court I appeal to the people of our state and of our country. They shall decide between us. I commit myself, without distrust, to their final award. I have nothing more to say.

When Mr. Dorr had finished his remarks, Chief Justice Durfee arose, and pronounced his sentence in the following words:

Listen, Thomas Wilson Dorr, to the sentence of the court; which is, that the said Thomas W. Dorr be imprisoned in the state prison at Providence, in the

county of Providence, for the term of his natural life, and there kept at hard labor in separate confine

ment.

The court had now gone to the extent of their province, and hurled their last bolt against their defenceless victim; and on the 27th of June, 1844, just two years after Mr. Dorr dismissed his forces at Chepatchet, he was removed to the state prison in Providence, and incarcerated in a cell, where, according to the sentence of the court, he was to remain during his natural life.

So far as we are acquainted with the history of criminal treason, it has been contrived and conducted with more or less secrecy it has consisted of clandestine attempts to surprise and overthrow the government by force. Mr. Dorr's case was the very reverse of this. Every thing had been done in the most public manner possible, and the whole proceedings consisted of a series of steps which followed each other at intervals which gave all parties ample time to consider them. If Mr. Dorr was guilty of the highest crime known to any law because he labored to sustain a democratic government which the people had ordained, then hundreds of others were guilty of the same crime; and why should he be made a scapegoat for the sins of the whole party? Why pursue him alone with such unrelenting hostility, when there were so many others who had with him actually taken up arms?

CHAPTER XIV.

REFLECTIONS.

THE history of treason shows that it has been chiefly confined to arbitrary and unjust governments, and that far the largest number of those who have suffered for that crime have been good men, who sought to relieve their own people from the oppressive measures of their rulers. If Great Britain had succeeded in overcoming the rebellion, as she called it, in her American colonies, in 1776, then George Washington and Nathaniel Greene, with all their compatriots, would have been held guilty of treason. The essential characteristics of this crime are said to consist in levying war against the sovereign power of the state to which the offender owes allegiance. In a monarchical government the sovereign power is supposed to belong to a single individual. In Russia the will of the czar is the sovereign power; therefore to resist that will is treason, because that people suppose that by divine appointment the right to rule runs forever in the blood of a certain family; and similar sentiments prevail in all countries governed by hereditary monarchs. The government of Great Britain, from which we have obtained many of our ideas of jurisprudence, is a mixture of monarchy, aristocracy, and democracy ;