THE GENERAL’S INDIVIDUALITY.

After a great deal of rambling talk about the composition of the jury, dissatisfaction with the record, lack of time for preparation, the sentencing of the prisoners in their absence and that of their counsel, the injustice done them by “unreasonable search and seizure,” etc., General Butler said that if all these things could be done the question was to be debated whether this government would not be a little better if it were overturned into an anarchy than if it were to be carried on in this fashion.

“I have no fear,” he said, “of being misunderstood upon this question. I have the individuality of being the only man in the ~~Uuited~~United States that condemned and executed men for undertaking to overturn the law. There were thousands of them. And for that act, please your honors, a price was set on my head as though I were a wolf, and $25,000 was offered to any man that could capture me, to murder me, by Jefferson Davis and his associates, and who, if they were here at your bar, trying to ascertain whether they should have an honest and a fair trial for their great crimes, and they called upon me—their lives in danger—I should hold it to be my duty to stand here and do all that I might to defend them. That is the chivalry of the law, if I understand it, and if I don’t it is of not much consequence, for I am quite easily and quickly passing away.”