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Show A Western Lavryer's Plea. Gentlemen of the Jury: The Script-ire saith, "Thou shalt not kill:" now if you hang niy client, you transgress the command as slick as grease, and as plump as a gooe egg in a loafer's face. Gentlemen, murder is murder, whether committed by twelve iurymen or by a ham die individual like my client. Gentlemen, I do not deny tne fact of my client having killed a man : but is that any reason why you should do to? o such thing, gentlemen. You may bring the prisoner in guilty, the hangman hang-man may do his duty, but will that exonerate you? iNo such thing: in that case you will all be murderers. Who among you is prepared for the brand of Cain to be stamped upon his brow to-day ? Who, freemen who. in this land cf liberiy and light? Gentlemen. I will pledge my word that not one of you has a bowie-knife or a pistol in his pocket. No, gentlemen, your pockets are odoriferous with the perfumes of cigar-cases and tobacco. You can smoke the tobaevo of rectitude in the pipe ot a peaceful conscience con-science ; but hang my client and the ecaly alligators of remorse will gallop through the internal principles of animal viscera until the ipinal vertebrae ver-tebrae of your anatomical construction is turned into a railroad for the grim and gory goblins of despair. Gentle-mrn, Gentle-mrn, beware of committing murder ! Beware of meddling with the eternal prerogrative ! Gentlemen, I adjure you, by the manumitted ghost of temporal tem-poral sanctity, to do no murder ! I adjure you by the name of woman, by the tickling time-piece of time's theoretical theo-retical transmigration, to do no murder mur-der ! I adjure you, by the love you have for the esculent and eondimental gusto of our native pumpkin, to do no murder ! I adjure you, by the stars set in the flying ensign of your emancipated eman-cipated country, to do no murder ! I adjure yau, by the American eagle that whipped the universal ganie-cock of creation, and now sits roosting on the magnetic telegraph of time's illustrious illus-trious transmigration, to do no murder mur-der ! And lastly, gentlemen, if you ever expect to wear store-made coats if you ever expect free dogs not to bark at you if yoa ever expect to wear boots made of the free hide of the Iloeky Mountain buffalo and to sum up all, if you ever expect, to be anything any-thing but a set of sneaking, loafing, rascally, cut-throated, braided small ends of humanity, whittled down into indistinctability, acquit my client and save your country ! |
