land are subjected,
and which must be supposed to be, and no doubt actually are, founded
upon the general principles of justice and equity which pervade every
civilized country. Amongst their mountains, as among the North American
Indians, the various tribes were wont to make war upon each other, so
that each man was obliged to go armed for his own protection. These men,
from the ideas which they entertained of their own descent and of
their own consequence, regarded themselves as so many cavaliers or
men-at-arms, rather than as the peasantry of a peaceful country. Those
laws of the ring, as my brother terms them, were unknown to the race of
warlike mountaineers; that decision of quarrels by no other weapons
than those which nature has given every man must to them have seemed as
vulgar and as preposterous as to the NOBLESSE of France. Revenge, on the
other hand, must have been as familiar to their habits of society as to
those of the Cherokees or Mohawks. It is indeed, as described by Bacon,
at bottom a kind of wild untutored justice; for the fear of retaliation
must withhold the hands of the oppressor where there is no regular law
to check daring violence. But though all this may be granted, and though
we may allow that, such having been the case of the Highlands in the
days of the prisoner's fathers, many of the opinions and sentiments must
still continue to influence the present generation, it cannot, and ought
not, even in this most painful case, to alter the administration of the
law, either in your hands, gentlemen of the jury, or in mine. The first
object of civilisation is to place the general protection of the law,
equally administered, in the room of that wild justice which every man
cut and carved for himself, according to the length of his sword and
the strength of his arm. The law says to the subjects, with a voice only
inferior to that of the Deity, 'Vengeance is mine.' The instant that
there is time for passion to cool, and reason to interpose, an injured
party must become aware that the law assumes the exclusive cognisance
of the right and wrong betwixt the parties, and opposes her inviolable
buckler to every attempt of the private party to right himself. I repeat
that this unhappy man ought personally to be the object rather of our
pity than our abhorrence, for he failed in his ignorance, and from
mistaken notions of honour. But his crime is not the less that of
murder, gentlemen, and, in your high and im