olders, confided to
your hands, in 1659, the high trust which you now hold. If such a
proceeding were unauthorized then, were you not guilty in accepting the
commission? If authorized, were not the same people competent to bestow
the trust upon another, whom they deemed more worthy to hold it? If this
be so, the insurgents, as you have chosen to call them, were not in arms
against the government at the siege of Jamestown. And thus the last
strand in the coil of evidence, with which you have involved me, is
broken, as withs are severed at the touch of fire. But light as is the
testimony against me, it is sufficient to turn the beam of justice, when
the sword of Brennus is cast into the scale.

"One word more and I am done; for I see you are impatient for the
sacrifice. I had thought that I would have been tried by a jury of my
peers. Such I deemed my right as a British subject. But condemned by the
extraordinary and unwarranted proceedings of this Star Chamber"--

"Silence!" cried Berkeley, again waxing wroth at such an imputation.

"I beg pardon once more," continued Hansford, "I thought the favourite
institution of Charles the First would not have met with so little
favour from such loyal cavaliers. But I demand in the name of Freedom,
in the name of England, in the name of God and Justice, when was Magna
Charta or the Petition of Right abolished on the soil of Virginia? Is
the Governor of Virginia so little of a lawyer that he remembers not the
language of the stout Barons of Runnymede, unadorned in style, but
pregnant with freedom. 'No freeman may be taken or imprisoned, or be
disseised of his freehold or liberties, or his free-customs, or be
outlawed or exiled, or in any manner destroyed, but by the lawful
judgment of his peers, or by the law of the land.' Excuse me, gentlemen,
for repeating to such sage judges so old and hackneyed a fragment of the
law. But until to-day, I had been taught to hold those words as sacred,
and as indeed containing the charter of the liberties of an Englishman.
Alas! it will no longer be hackneyed nor quoted by the slaves of
England, except when they mourn with bitter but hopeless tears, for the
higher and purer freedom of their ruder fathers. Why am I thus arraigned
before a court-martial in time of peace? Am I found in arms? Am I even
an officer or a soldier? The commission which I once held has been torn
from me, and given, as his thirty pieces, to you dissembling Judas, for
the pr