at I could not vote for, or
countenance in any way, a statute which stigmatizes with the crime of
piracy these men whom an act of Parliament had previously put out of the
protection of the law. When the legislature of this kingdom had ordered
all their ships and goods, for the mere new-created offence of
exercising trade, to be divided as a spoil among the seamen, of the
navy,--to consider the necessary reprisal of an unhappy, proscribed,
interdicted people, as the crime of piracy, would have appeared, in any
other legislature than ours, a strain of the most insulting and most
unnatural cruelty and injustice. I assure you I never remember to have
heard of anything like it in any time or country.

The second professed purpose of the act is to detain in England for
trial those who shall commit high treason in America.

That you may be enabled to enter into the true spirit of the present
law, it is necessary, Gentlemen, to apprise you that there is an act,
made so long ago as in the reign of Henry the Eighth, before the
existence or thought of any English colonies in America, for the trial
in this kingdom of treasons committed out of the realm. In the year 1769
Parliament thought proper to acquaint the crown with their construction
of that act in a formal address, wherein they entreated his Majesty to
cause persons charged with high treason in America to be brought into
this kingdom for trial. By this act of Henry the Eighth, _so construed
and so applied_, almost all that is substantial and beneficial in a
trial by jury is taken away from the subject in the colonies. This is,
however, saying too little; for to try a man under that act is, in
effect, to condemn him unheard. A person is brought hither in the
dungeon of a ship's hold; thence he is vomited into a dungeon on land,
loaded with irons, unfurnished with money, unsupported by friends, three
thousand miles from all means of calling upon or confronting evidence,
where no one local circumstance that tends to detect perjury can
possibly be judged of;--such a person may be executed according to form,
but he can never be tried according to justice.

I therefore could never reconcile myself to the bill I send you, which
is expressly provided to remove all inconveniences from the
establishment of a mode of trial which has ever appeared to me most
unjust and most unconstitutional. Far from removing the difficulties
which impede the execution of so mischievous a project, I