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fense, is printed by the undersigned for the purpose of preserving in print what is considered by the Bar of the South, the greatest exposition of the Unwritten Law. The address to the jury certainly belongs to the higher class of forensic literature and for purity of diction, grandeur of thought and general excellence, is unsur- passed in legal literature. The undersigned has sought diligently for two or three years for a copy of this masterpiece and finally located what is believed to be the last remaining copy in print. This is reprinted for the sole purpose of preservation and not for profit. Only enough copies are printed to pay cost of publication. Owing to limited number print- ed the price must be fixed to pay the expense. Copies of this great speech can be obtained from THOS. F. CROSBY,
Price $1.00.
Muskogee,Okla.
623 and 624 Flynn-Ames Building BOWIE COUNTY, TEXAS 29th of July, 1896, with intent to kill and murder. I did shoot him four times and wounded him very dan- gerously with deliberate intent to kill him. A large number of my friends, and especially relatives, have urged me to permit the publication of my address to the jury in my own interest on the trials of the case; but until now I have declined because I preferred that the trial and all the extraordinary incidents connected with it should perish in oblivion. But this passive action seems to have invited continuous falsehood by the bigots who sought my destruction in the bitterest and most vin- dictive persecution in the annals of modern jurispru- dence. (now divorced) was a communicant in his church for two years at Lonoke, Ark., and afterwards four years at Tex- arkana. He was a frequent and welcome guest in my home very often during my professional absence, and I never doubt- ed the purity of his intentions until the spring of 1895. By some arrangement between him and my wife he ad- vanced $680 to pay off a mortgage on my residence, which had become a judgment lien, and took an assignment of the lien. As additional security I conveyed to him over 600 acres of land, which he was to sell and apply to the debt. the spring of 1895, my wife, without consulting me, made Forbes an absolute deed to our residence, and wrote me that it was by express agreement between her and Forbes, intended simply as a better security for his debt. Under this assurance and the implicit confidence I had in Forbes, I also signed the deed at Nashville. To my ut- ter amazement Forbes immediately after getting the deed offered the place for sale at less than one-half its cost. This was reported by letter from my wife with the contradictory excuses for Forbes' action. I immediately prepared a bill in chancery enjoining the sale and asking credit for the land conveyed to Forbes and sent it by mail to my wife with instructions to file it immediately, and she wrote that she had had a conference with Forbes and she refused to file it. This conduct to me disclosed the disloyalty of each, and that a conspiracy between them existed to which no loyal wife could ever possibly become a party. It is needless to say that my astonishment was only equaled by the indignation I felt. I immediately wrote to her a caustic letter fully disclosing the unfavorable convictions her conduct forced on me. At the same time I wrote to Forbes a letter of great severity, forbidding him to go to my house or to in any way advise or have commu- nication with my wife, and stated that a violation of the imperative injunction in any way would be visited with personal responsibility, and I sent my wife a copy of that letter. Then she wrote me that she was "in helpless and hopeless despair," but had gone and filed the bill, and enclosed a copy of the fiat of the judge for the injunction with her statement that every word in the bill was true. Forbes then lived eighty miles distant from Texar- kana. Immediately on receipt of my letter forbidding any communication with my wife, he went to my house and was graciously received by my wife and held another long conference with her, and then went down into the city and boasted that his influence with her was greater than mine, and stated that the bill against him would not be prosecuted. The bill was in the joint names of myself and her against him, and she utterly refused to give any evidence or in any way aid in its prosecution, thus con- firming the conspiracy and relations that existed between them. I then said that I would kill him on sight, and it was no secret. I filed an amended bill, setting up the fact that she, although a party plaintiff, was secretly aiding the defendant, and asked that she be made a defendant, and the court so ordered. I left her, of course, and after I left her she turned the house over to Forbes, although she had promised when she vacated to give me possession. I give these particulars because the prosecution as- sumed the lawsuit to be the sole cause of my shooting him, when in fact it simply led to a disclosure, full and complete, of the criminal relations existing between them, for which alone I shot him. She repeatedly refused to give any explanation of her conduct. She had a blind or secret opening from the alley into the back yard. Forbes often visited Texarkana for days at a time without any legitimate business. Finally, she read me the story of a soldier taking his wounded comrade off of the battlefield, and said: "That is my idea of fidelity to a friend." To which I replied: "At last you give me this miserable explanation of your disloyalty to me and shameless fidelity to your paramour," and she replied, "You can construe it as you please." Forbes' explanation was that he went to my house in violation of my injunction to see after a dress pattern, and that he did not think I would shoot him. This on cross-examination, and further that his interpretation of my letter was that I suspected improper relations be- tween him and my wife, and he admitted that he had stated that the suit would not be prosecuted. On the second trial on cross-examination he admitted renting the Nix residence in Texarkana for a widow and her three little children; that he did this as a charity and auxiliary to the ladies' aid society, and stated that he had carried his wife once to see this widow and her three little girl children. He was not then aware that he would be compelled to confront an unimpeachable lady witness who would state the facts about his visits to and connec- tion with these three little girl children. Mrs. Howel, a relative of the sheriff, and many of the best citizens of Bowie county, was then put on the stand, and stated that the Nix residence, rented by Forbes, was the residence where her deceased mother had died, and then belonged to an absent sister, whom she represented in her absence; that the three daughters of the widow who occupied the house with their mother were appar- ently aged 16, 18 and 20 years, and that all three of these were notoriously lewd women; that she felt much indig- nation at the use of the property for any such vile pur- pose, and went to Forbes and urged him to take them out because of their disreputable characters, which he re- fused to do, and still continued his visits to these lewd women. That by finesse she got possession of one room of the house, and finally succeeded in driving Forbes and his tenants out; that she had much trouble and harsh words with Forbes, who obstinately persisted in protect- ing these lewd women. This evidence came on him like a thunderbolt in a clear sky, and, although within reach of rebuttal evidence, if he had any, he never produced it nor did he return to the witness stand to contradict one word Mrs. Howell had said. and the fact that I had so stated was communicated to him. I had often visited the depots and places where I expected to find him, without success. Finally, I went within sight of his residence and sent a negro there to find out where he was; found he was at New Lewisville, Ark., and went there and stayed one day and night. He was engaged in a protracted meeting and I did not see him. I knew that he often went to Texarkana; hence I went to Texarkana and watched the incoming train to find and kill him. A friend at Texarkana who knew my purpose and the facts which fixed that purpose in my mind, without my knowledge or procurement, wrote Forbes a decoy letter asking him to come to Texarkana and marry a couple, and he received a postal saying he would be there on the morning of the 29th. The friend showed me this reply, and I utilized it for all it was worth. Forbes stated that the letter was in my handwriting disguised. I told the prosecuting counsel and the jury, when on the witness stand, the facts as here stated, but added: "I don't want any doubt thrown over my statement of facts. You are all at perfect liberty, for all the purposes of this trial, to consider me the author of this letter." He came and I was watching for him and came very near missing him. He did not get off where all the other passengers did. The train backs into the depot and he got off at the front end of the forward car. I was confident he saw me and avoided meeting me in that way, but he denies it. I waited for all the passengers to get off and failing to see him, rushed ahead of the retiring people and turned around to get another view. Then I saw him standing still. He looked at me and then turned west along the south side of the depot. I followed in haste on the north side and headed off his retreat. He faced me at the distance of thirty feet, and I said: "Why did you go to my house, after I forbid your visits?" and he said, "You lie!" and I pulled down on him, and would have shot him through the heart, but he turned as I pulled the trigger and the ball glanced and lodged against his spine. It staggered him, but he recovered and advanced on me, and I fired twice more before he reached me, hitting him very near the center of his neck. He reached me and knocked off the fourth shot, which hit the depot building. He struggled a short time for the pistol, and while he had the muzzle in hand, under his chin, I fired the fifth and last shot, which made the third shot in the neck. He staggered and fell in the depot, and before I could get out another weapon he was pulled on the floor into an- other room. I thought he could not live five minutes. My hands were covered with his blood. The little Baptist church at Texarkana (shining mem- bers thereof) immediately after their shining brother was shot, got together and resoluted anathemas against me, in what they called an indignation meeting, and they aroused a mob spirit to lynch me, without ever alluding to my grievances or stating one fact in my favor. I waived examination and was sent to jail by Justice Haywood. The next evening I was brought to Texarkana. The train on which I came stopped after dark in the outskirts of the city, where I was taken in charge by Justice Hay- wood and a strong guard of armed men, and was in- formed that the Baptists had raised a mob spirit, and that I was brought out to protect me against such de- struction. I was given a double-barrel shotgun and, twenty rounds of blue whistlers, and was taken to the city hall, where I stayed an hour, whilst large numbers looked at me. They realized that hell was in the air, and that it would cost some blood to lynch me besides my own and they made "discretion the better part of valor." These good Christians, having the promotion of re- ligion so much at heart, then appointed a committee to intercede with people to prevent my giving bond, and they put a corps of little Baptist preachers in the field, who preached hell and damnation and my funeral in every nook and corner of Bowie county, to prejudice the people and make it impossible for me to get an impartial jury. I shall ever feel grateful to Justice Haywood and the officers and guards he placed over me for their uniform courtesy and determination to resist, at the peril of their lives, any violence offered me, and their noble conduct in resisting the appeals of deluded ladies of the Baptist church to put me in irons; also to Martin Foster who made my first bond regardless of the appeals to him not to do it. Whilst the indignation meeting was laying its trains of explosives, my wife took a hand and left the bedside of a sick daughter to visit and instruct the district attor- ney and continued her utmost exertions to the end to con- vict me. Sympathizing members of the church poured consolation into the bosoms of both their criminal mem- bers and all concurred in the opinion that "Hallum would be consigned to a felon's tomb." She sent my children to see and condole with the bleeding libertine. The local press shot skyrockets at me, and the con- temptible junto succeeded in boycotting the local bar, against me, except William Hudgins, who appeared be- fore the committal court for me; but not in either trial of the cause. And here, lest I do injustice I must except Charles Todd, who would have defended me had he been present. He has the courage of his convictions, united to great talent and integrity of purpose. Judge Dillard, of DeKalb, Texas, came into the trial as my counsel, after the selection of the jury on the first trial; and he, with his personal friends, made my second bond. On the thir- teenth day of my imprisonment Martin Foster made my bond, and I returned to Little Rock to wait my trial in October. A guard accompanied me through the city to prevent mob violence, should any be attempted. When I arrived in Texarkana on my way to trial, I learned for the first time that I would be required to give a new bond. I wrote to the judge and district at- torney informing them of that fact, and also that I would go back to Arkansas and secure indemnity for my bonds- men and return immediately to stand my trial. But the little junto of Baptists sent the sheriff after me as a fugitive from justice, and columns of sensational criti- cism appeared in the press. But they were forced to abandon that on the second trial and were sorry they urged it on the first, so complete was my refutations of the fugitive business. The pulpit and the press had done their dirty work so effectively that I could not obtain a change of venue. My side of the case had not been tried in either of those jur- isdictions. I reserved my strength, and kept my powder dry. I applied to many members of the local bar for aid at least in selecting a jury, but the highly Christianized embargo went with the multitude. Judge Dillard had not then appeared in the case. The first trial commenced on the 8th of October and ended on the 10th in a mistrial, ten of the jurors being for imposing the lowest penalty, a fine of $25, and two Baptists for conviction of a felony. It was the universal sentiment, without any solitary exception, before I made my own defense, that I would be convicted. I never for one moment thought so. The Hon. Hiram Glass, a very able lawyer, was district attorney, and conducted the prosecution. Before I had spoken half an hour, it was clear to me that a conviction was impossible. The by- standers crowded around me and were removed back by order of the court four times before I closed. A few weeks before my trial two similar cases had been tried in Texas. One resulted in a conviction of felony and sentenced for four years; the other in conviction and sentence for twenty years. This precedent and public opinion manufactured by the spiritual gentlemen were overwhelmingly against me. The district attorney was kind enough to say to the jury in his reply in his opening sentence, "That speech was the finest piece of acting I ever saw on any stage,'' and he said afterward, that before my address, he would not have given 25 cents to insure conviction. The second trial was on the 9th, 10th and 11th of March, 1897. The old officers, Judge Sheppard and Hiram Glass, district attorney, had gone out of office in the fall elections and were succeeded by Judge Tolbert and Rob- ert Hart, district attorney, with whom Pleasant Turner was associated in the prosecution. After my first trial I had a host of friends in Bowie county. When they saw how the public mind had been so grossly abused they re- volted at the injustice I had suffered, and manifested great interest in my behalf and treated me with the ut- most kindness and consideration. Many ladies came to hear me on the second trial and manifested much inter- est. I shall ever feel a deep sense of gratitude to the chivalrous gentlemen and noble ladies of that county for their unremitting attention and kindness to me in the hour of sorrow and trial. And to Judge W. W. Dillard, of DeKalb, Texas, who made my second bond, in connec- tion with his friends whom he induced to go on it, and who appeared in my behalf in the trials in both instances, language can never convey my sense of gratitude and ob- ligation to these gentlemen. Herculean efforts were made to convict me of felony. Spies were sent to me in the guise of friends to entrap and forestall me, but being forewarned was to be fore- armed, and they failed to penetrate the veil. Elijah Adcock and his noble wife, W. W. Bloxham, Dr. H. A. Burrows, Oliver Daniels, J. L. Barfield, T. E. Dow- dle, W. P. Lash, Lyman S. Roach, F. M. Brooks, and a host of others, both ladies and gentlemen, became the best and truest of friends after my first trial. The trial resulted in a fine of $50 and a very large bill of costs. But the good people of Bowie county would not let me pay one cent. In a few minutes after the jury rendered their verdict I was handed a receipt and dis- charged from custody. My friends were enthusiastic over the result. The Hon. Charles Todd, one of the ablest lawyers and best men of Texas, immediately after the rendition of the verdict, said "As much as I love my native state, if that old man had been convicted of a fel- ony I would have folded my tent and left the state. Both Judge Sheppard and Judge Tolbert, before whom the trials were had, are very able, upright and impartial judges, as their charge to the jury shows, which I give in the appendix.* Mr. Hart, the district attorney, in the desperation of his cause, threatened to resign if I was not convicted of a felony, but thought better of it after- wards and held on to his job. The whole contest was over the charge of felony. I did not controvert the fact that I was guilty of an assault under the statute. stances as extraordinary and vindictive as the junto of religious bigots and traducers of my good name could make it. In the name of the religion they profess and disgrace they have stooped to methods low and vile to compass my ruin. I know no parallel in the history of American juris- prudence since the prosecutions for witchcraft in New England in the days of Cotton Mather. Nor do I know of a darker parallel in the history of English jurispru- dence since the abolition of the ecclesiastical Court of High Commission, which in the name of religion, con- signed men and women to be burnt at the stake for con- scientious religious convictions, and for minor offenses, *[Not included in this edition] cropped ears and slit the noses of helpless victims. The methods adopted by the infamous court of Star Chamber, under the no less infamous reins of the House of Stuart, was not the less derogatory to humanity and justice and civilization, than the methods adopted by priests and their lay coadjutors in this prosecution. I am an utter stranger to this jury and the people of your county, from which you have been selected, and you know nothing of me except the vile slanders which have been filtered through the ulcerated hearts and tongues of the members of the Baptist church at Texarkana, and their associate priests and laymen, whom they have set after me in pulpit, highway and private residence. They have industriously preached my funeral all over the county for the twofold purpose of rendering it imposs- ible to get an impartial jury, and to cover up the infamy and shame of the scoundrel I shot and the woman he ruined. This hypocritical corporation of priests and lay- men have lauded their lascivious brother and fallen sis- ter in the church to the skies and have tried to damn me to perdition. They have knowingly lied to deceive the public. Their indignation meeting to encourage and inspire mob violence having failed through their fears to mat- erialize, they then tried to poison the public mind against me, and succeeded for the time in accomplishing that part of the programme. This junto of falsifiers knows no more of the true principles of Christianity than a herd of hyenas know of political economy. I shot one of their sanctimonious herd of ghouls who now poses with them as a martyr before you with per- jury on his lips as rank as the crime for which he was shot. The same may be said of the junto, who stoop to subordinate the vices which pertain to the lower order of men for the purpose of covering up the vilest crime. When you strike one of these bigots you hit the whole guild and they all show their teeth. When evil deeds filter through this close corporation of bigots to the public ear, its leaders apply for a package of the devil's virus, la- beled whitewash and they apply it vigorously. This is a contest between virtue and vice, between truth and falsehood. Not the least of the extraordinary methods resorted to by this junto of saints lies in the fact that they succeeded in boycotting the local bar by deterring them from de- fending me. (Judge Dillard, who appeared is not of the local bar. He lives at DeKalb). Charles Todd would have defended me had he been present. He is an able man, possessed of the courage of his convictions united to integrity of purpose. The fact of being deserted by the local bar added much to the weight of public opinion against me. It shows the weakness of some men. Wil- lows bend before the storm, oaks resist the tempest. I leave a generous public to judge whether they sustained the dignity of a noble profession and that distinguishing individuality of character which each member ought to possess. You gentlemen occupy the judgment seat, the highest position man can assign his fellow mortal. If there is a tribunal on earth where all the passions and prejudices of men should sink in the presence of all that is divine in man it is the judgment seat. Pagan priests, jurists and philosophers recognized this many centuries before the Christian era, and they represented the god- dess of justice as blindfolded, that she might not know the contestants nor partake of their passions and preju- dices. From this you will readily perceive what I con- ceive to be the greatest obstacle in my way, and yet I do not entertain the slightest doubt of removing that before I get through. Long experience at the bar, from a petty justice court to the highest tribunals in the land, con- vinces me that the influence of counsel with juries and judges rises or falls in a ratio with the ability and can- dor with which he deals with facts. And it further justi- fies the conviction that it is often a herculean task to re- move preconceived prejudices, especially so when tinged with religious bigotry and intolerance. But nearly all men when removed or lifted above these baneful influ- ences will render what they conceive to be a just verdict. Forced to exercise my reserved right under your con- stitution to defend myself, I shall ex necessitate rei be compelled to say much of myself, like Paul when ar- raigned before Agrippa and Festus, after escaping lynch- ing by the Jews, which under other conditions would be vulnerable to criticism. I have an interest by inheritance in the history and fame of Texas which carries with it a right to be respect- fully heard by Texans, whether citizens by birth or adop- tion. When Texas, with but a handful of patriots was in the toils of war and revolution, led by that great his- toric character, Sam Houston, against greatly superior members of tyrants her cry of distress and appeal for aid to the neighboring commonwealths of the United States reached the Hallum family on their native heath in that glorious old volunteer state that gave me birth. They knew and loved Sam Houston--had fought the sav- ages by his side under Jackson in the wilderness. That appeal stirred "the heroic tide that poured through their dauntless hearts," and they gave Houston and Texas two of their generous and heroic sons. The gallant and chivalric Henry Hallum, my father's brother, and the Hon. W. R. V. Hallum, known as Ranse Hallum, my father's first cousin, like the gallant knight of Ivanhoe, traveled many weary miles, and with trusty rifles in hand threaded their way through hostile tribes of Indians to the camp of Sam Houston and shared with him and compatriots the dangers and the fadeless glory of San Jacinto. With them they stood sponsors to the bloody baptism of Texas into the sisterhood of na- tions--with them they lifted the star that thrills your patriotism to that exalted firmament where I, with you, hope it will forever shine with the undiminished lustre of its birth as one of the greatest in the grandest aggre- gation of states the world has yet known. Rome, when she claimed to be mistress of the world, was a dwarf compared to these states. Henry Hallum never returned to his family, whose tear- ful farewell on the banks of the historic Cumberland, where he buckled on his armor and weighed anchor for the distant scene of conflict to fight your battles, was the last. But he left an honorable heritage to them, and to you, and to all the coming generation of Texas. Soon after the battle he sickened and died of disease contract- ed in your service in the meridian of a splendid manhood, and was buried where the city of Houston now stands, and his ashes glorifies the soil he fought to redeem. The Hon. W. R. V. Hallum, after filling many places of honor and trust, was taken to his fathers, and in all the traditions and history of the family there is nothing we love more than the simple inscription on the marble shaft which marks the spot where he lies awaiting the judgment day, "He fought under Houston at San Ja- cinto." No truer, no braver men ever drew a sword or wore a plume in the carnage of battle, and their heirs . have never bartered the heritage of their fame for a Texas land grant. My brother-in-law, Capt. Angus Greenlaw, was another one of the heroes of San Jacinto. No braver sol- dier ever pulled a trigger or wielded a sword in battle; no truer man to all the demands and relations of life ever lived. His remains repose in Elmwood, that city of peace by the great inland river. I was with him in his expiring hour, and with tearful eyes and gentle hands helped to lay him away. The chief executive of this nation, under whose admin- istration Texas was incorporated into the federal union, was related to my family. But the heraldry of these men lend no importance to me, if otherwise I am found without meritorious consi- deration, wholly my own, and I claim none, but simply mention them as inducements to conviction in your minds, that in common with every other man accused of crime, I ought not to be denied the guarantee of a fair and impartial trial under the organic sanction of your laws. I am on trial for shooting a clergymen, who for a ser- ies of years had been cordially invited and welcomed to the hospitalities of a cultured and refined home. Invited there and pensioned on its hospitality because of the re- ligion and purity of life he so blandly and artfully pro- fessed and disgraced. His duties were by precept, example and exposition to teach the exalted doctrine of the gentle Nazarene, who "went about the world doing good," and with index fin- ger to point and lead the way to God and immortality. Those duties are beautifully set forth by Goldsmith, the Anacreon of Ireland, in his description of the village parson: "Like the bird each fond endearment tries,Every possible confidence was reposed in this pen- sioner on the charities and bounties of religion. If there is one spot on earth luminously marked by the Creator as typical of the glorious fruitions of the eternal day; if there is one hallowed and consecrated spot, where in this transitory life all that is true, lovely and pure in human character rises to the surface and banishes every sordid infirmity and sanctifies hallowed associations; if there is one spot above all others where all that is divine in the character of man rises to the surface and sheds its beneficient influences for time and eternity it is the fam- ily home; whether the humble abode of the cotter or the palace that covers a throne. If there is one crime trans- cending all others in enormity, it is that of the clergymen pensioned on the revenues and confiding hospitalities of that home, to promote the culture and practice of true Christianity, who uses the opportunities thus afforded to lead the wife and mother down to a rayless night and an endless hell. There is not, there never can be in the wide world of crime, a death so mournfully sorrowful and heartrend- ing as the extinction of virtue in a living corpse, once the intelligent wife and mother. "The parting of the ways" when virtue bids its eternal farewell to all that is exalted and pure in earth and heaven; carries all down, down, for- ever down in the wreck of time and eternity. All other deaths leave hope, virtue, family pride and fame, to sur- vive, blended in fond memory with a loving and refining sorrow. But when the wife yields to `primrose dalliances' of Judas Iscariot in clerical robes and consents to be- come the faded refuse of a violated bed, nothing is left to the household idols that once surrounded her but a wilderness of rayless and hopeless sorrow. I once loved that woman with an idolatry surpassing oriental idealism, and then, if I had had an empire I would have placed the crown on her head. Of all men the world has known, I am more deeply concerned in the chastity and purity of her once noble character than all others--but alas! alas! there is nothing left even for rational credulity to base a hope that my convictions are not true. If I could be convinced that she is yet the pure woman I led to the fatal altar, I would give, if pos- sessed of a thousand lives, all for the consolation of that conviction. To those who cannot stand in my shoes, those who cannot suffer as I have suffered, to those who cannot feel as I feel, this declaration may appear as an ex- travaganza, therfore, I do not ask the jury to believe it but I lay it at the foot of the throne that the Great Searcher of all hearts may attest its sincerity as He will judge me on the final day. My age admonishes me that the record for that inevi- table hour is near completion, and I wish to shun the at- titude of appearing to make untrue statements. To save my innocent children, I am ready to make any sacrifice, however great, save that of my honor--to sacrifice that would involve them. I wish you to look in on my heart as in a mirror; like the sun it has its spots, but what man since the creation has escaped imperfection in some de- gree? In this fierce contest between virtue and truth on one side and vice and falsehood on the other, I rely solely on the invincible power of truth. It is the central idea which glorifies our God--the pivot on which He has balanced the mechanism of the Universe. Though crushed to the earth by multitudes of people it will rise again on crystal wings, and in the crisis of a conflict like this it needs no aid, but a mind powerful enough within its own resources to discover, and expose falsehood. It spurns the arts of sophistry and devices of the demagogue. Its essence is as pure and eternal as the God it glorifies; whilst falsehood rots and perishes and forever inspires loathing and contempt in all the better types of mankind. "Thrice is he armed whose cause is just," and there is a divinity in the nature and character of man when true to himself through storm and through sunshine, in which I repose the same absolute confidence that Bona- parte, the man of destiny, did when he seized the eagles of France, rallied his recoiling, shattered columns and led the victorious charge at Lodi, in the face of a catar- act of fire from one hundred pieces of cannon and one hundred thousand muskets. I was never born for penal servitude at the behests of a junto of a whoring church hypocrites, whose disgrace and defame the name of the religion they parade under the fiendish devices of hell in the name of purity. Madame Roland, a victim of the French Revolution, when on the way to execution passed a statute of liberty, and exclaimed, "Ah, liberty, what crimes are committed in thy name!" Paraphrased, we may with much greater emphasis say, "Ah, religion, What crimes are committed in thy name!" Here, lest I be misunderstood, let me say I believe in the inspiration of Moses and the prophets and the divinity of Christ, and entertain a profound respect for all sin- cere Christians of whatever sect, but I have a profound contempt for the religious bigot and hypocrite--that it is only the hypocrite I am now after. He is found in all churches, in fact my observation confirms the conviction that the churches are composed of two extremes of so- ciety--the sincere Christian and the knavish hypocrite who "puts on the livery of heaven to serve the devil.'' He is a goody, goody fellow, who puts up long prayers in public and wears a sanctimonious face, and to the out- ward world assumes a fitness and readiness to be trans- lated. They are the men who whitewash libertine clergy- men and give them a certificate of exemplary Christian character, when the force of public opinion forces their removal to another seat of the saints, that they may again recruit their theological harem. They are the men who held the indignation meeting to incite mob violence the morning I shot the libertine they so love and admire. To protect and screen such a man from public scorn and the odium his character deserves is the gravest of crimes against society, and to do it in the name of reli- gion is blasphemy against God and the Savior of man- kind. It is impossible conceive of a greater crime than that which he committed against me and mine. Murder, arson, robbery, rape and every other crime leave their victims still in possession of the greatest of all posses- sions--their virtue. If with dagger in hand, he had stolen into my home at the dark and silent hour of midnight and murdered all its inmates; it would have been a trans- cendent blessing compared to the crime he did commit. This is the caricature on manhood whom this close cor- poration of hypocrites preach up all over Bowie county as "the greatest man who ever entered the State of Texas." The thief crying "Stop thief!" for the purpose of deceiving the public and arousing a spirit of indigna- tion against me, so as to render it impossible to get an impartial jury in this county. Let me say to you, gentlemen, in all sincerity, that I would have shot the base-born libertine if the angels of heaven had been guarding him when I got within gun- shot of him, and that I would have camped on his trail a thousand years, if we could have lived that long and it had required that time to come up with him. And let me say further, that I shot him with all the coolness and pre- meditated deliberation that it is possible for a rational mind to conceive, and I hope this deliberate statement will relieve the gentlemen from all further labored effort about malice and premeditation, preparation and de- liberation. If it were possible for the same emergencies to arise a thousand times, I would repeat the same remedy in each case in defiance of all the penal statutes of the world. There are some things in which I fix my own stand- ards, and this is one of them. The remedy I applied is certainly more effectual than sacramental wine or catnip tea. There is an over-production of these libertine clergy- men just now in this country, and the whitewashing pro- cess has indefinitely increased the number beyond its preservative virtues, and the hypocrites who employ this stale, antiquated remedy must accept mine until his satanic majesty furnishes them with a better one. I have there on the table before me a record of twenty of these high priests in the temple of religion who have tempor- arily resigned that occupation until they graduate in the various preparatory departments in the penitentiary reformatories of many states of this union. I simply men- tion this to corroborate my statement about the decline in the preservative virtues of whitewash and necessity for better remedies. I am not one of those negative, passive characters, who wire and worm their way through life without jostling up against any of its rough edges. Such men are incapa- ble of coping with the great emergencies of life. There are sometimes junctures in our lives when to submit to indignities would involve hopeless degradation, and the injury for which I washed my hands in the blood of the libertine is one of them. I would have shot him had I known it would have involved my instant death. Has any or all the records of mankind, or of hell, any darker or more revolting picture of human depravity than that of the libertine priest administering the Lord's sacrament to the wife he has ruined? The hero of the hypocrites, who shield and laud him, often repeated both crimes. He and his junto of hypocrites have induced my child to come here with him to influence the selection and corruption of this trial jury with the ruined mother's sanction. "Hell hath no fury like a woman scorned." I defy and challenge all the records of mankind, all the horrid imps of Dante's Inferno, and all the records of hell to produce a meaner man than W. A. Forbes. Down, and downward, forever hellward, the trend of his degrada- tion--to influence a wife and child to seek a husband's and father's blood--nay, a thousandfold worse, to see his degradation in penal servitude. You gentlemen must re- member that this contest is only over the felony charged in the indictment and not on the assault embraced in it, which I admit. Yea, still more than all this and his heroic lying under oath. He has held his innocent wife up as a screen be- tween him and the whorehouse he established in Texar- kana. You remember he admitted renting the private resi- dence of Mrs. Nix, deceased, and placing a widow and her three daughters in it. That he swore these daughters were little children; that he paid the rent out of his own funds as an auxiliary to the ladies' aid society; that he carried his wife there and was frequently there to see them. This had a plausible and charitable phase on it. But Mrs. Howel, a witness and lady of irreproachable character, who is connected with many of the best fam- ilies of your county told you that these little children were grown women of notorious ill-fame and that she had much trouble in driving them out because of Forbes' persistent protection of these loose women. His counsel, or that of the syndicate of hypocrites who employed him to prosecute in this case, Mr. Turner says, "Forbes had private funds of his own, and did not use the church money" on the nest of wenches he established in the Nix residence. This apology is enough to damn any man. But the advocate says, "His intentions were good." Yes, hell is paved with good intentions, and a hypocrite was never known to entertain other than good intentions. The syndicate of hypocrites who inspired a mob feeling against me without the courage to lead it, no doubt had good intentions, which assumed an angelic character when they found it would cost some blood to execute me. It is an awful injury and shock to a refined Christian community to shoot an evangelist who takes the Bible in one hand and his libertine possessions in the other and works with both for the benefit of society. Let me say, associated as my lineage is with the best people and phase of your history, if I am to be stricken down for defending the purity of my home and avenging myself on the man who has destroyed and thrown a pall of desolation over it, then I would say in the language of the gifted Prentiss, "Tear down the star that answers to the name of Texas, but let the stripe on your national ensign remain as an emblem of her degradation." This desolation leaves me and my children standing on the sands of a shoreless sea, looking out on the awful ruins of a once happy home which God Almighty cannot repair. In the dark shadows of that ruin I see two skele- tons with fleshless bones and eyeless sockets, and grin- ning teeth, mocking God. Often have I read the record of King David's great sorrow that will survive the wreck of worlds when that greatest man in the lineage of the Savior, from the depths of his agonized heart exclaimed, "Absalom, Absalom, oh, my son Absalom" and as often have my sympathies been stirred to their foundation. Little did I think that a cruel and remorseless fate had in store for me a greater sor- row, that would cause my soul to quiver on its founda- tion in the echo, "Children, children, oh, my innocent children." That they should be carried down in a con- flagration set on fire by a priest enjoying the hospitality of my household to promote their spiritual welfare, is an enormity beyond the endurance of God--much less hum- anity.* I wish I were a Roman of the iron age, and could this hour die like Napoleon's guard at Waterloo. I crave the indulgence of generous mankind for my children who are innocent sufferers from agencies wholly foreign to any infirmity of their own. They are pure and refined and incapable of intentional wrong. With them, as with me, the pall falls as heavily as that which shroud- ed the cross of Calvary and rent the temple through the turpitude of false priests. I am not stoic nor Spartan enough to crush back the tears which such calamities bring. Their lineage, with the detraction temporarily thrown over my name, will pass away and perish with the false- hoods in which it originated. Then with filial devotion they will bend their pilgrim feet to the humble mound where my ashes rest. On it they will drop a rose and a tear, from which incense will ascend with their prayers to heaven, and they will rise up and feel glorified that they were sired by man who defied all the powers of earth and hell and rode the storm in defense of their hon- est inheritance of a good name--who fought their battles, worthy of his own lineage and their filial affection. They have been taught, and they know that "virtue is its own reward;" that it is of the essence of God; that it shines and flashes like the diamond under all conditions; that it is beyond the power of tongue or pen to lend it a charm, because its native glories lie beyond their reach in a heavenly halo of cloud through which such agencies *Here the speaker's emotion overcame him for a few moments, and the jury and audience were in profound sympathy with him Re- covering he proceeded. cannot struggle. The man who would assail it ought to be "whipped with a scorpion's lash" until time is no more. The world holds no sorrow greater than ours. They have bloomed into beautiful, refined womanhood. I am left in advanced age with but one dominant desire on earth--the honor of my children and lineage. The future holds nothing in store for me this side the dark river. I am this hour fighting my last battle for more than an empire is worth, either to my children or self. With the close of this address my bannor is forever furled. What man at my age, laboring under such incurable calamities, can forget them in the onrushing tide of human pursuits and again essay the higher fields of honorable ambition, and give his arrows the sweep of the sun, no matter how far short of its splendid meridian they may fall.* In the expression of sorrow I do not for one moment wish you to think it springs from having shot this mon- ster of depravity. I did it coolly, deliberately, and with preparation adequate to the end; and if the same provo- cation could arise a thousand times, I would as often repeat the act. It has the entire approval of my con- science, the endorsement of all the higher types of man- kind in all ages, and the sanction of God. When Moses, the great shepherd prophet, was called first to Horeb, and then to the flaming clouds around the summit of Sinai, God wrote with his own finger on tab- lets of stone a commission to all the children of man to destroy the libertine priest who enters the household and uproots hallowed family ties and associations. All stu- dents and men of any depth of thought and research known[sic] that Moses was clothed with both spiritual and political power, and that the ten commandments were God's organic sanction for the exercise of all that vast power and authority in His name. In every book of the Pentateuch Moses has denounced the penalty of death against these enemies of the human race, going so far *At this point the Court suspended proceedings for a few minutes, when the sheriff conducted through the bar the wife of Rev. Mr. Coleman, Methodist minister, who, with a cordial grasp of the hand, said, "In behalf of the ladies present, and myself, I am authorized to say 'God bless you; we wish the world had more such men.' " To which I re- plied, "Tell the ladies 'God bless them for their encouragement; that with their endorsement I feel master of the situation.' " in the exercise of his divine authority as to say, "Their souls shall be cut off from among men," thus denoun- cing the annihilation of these social Judas Iscariots as unfit to associate with those undergoing penal servitude in hell. In all the seventy cities of refuge established in Israel these false priests were not permitted to take re- fuge in any of them. The mission of Christ, the great successor of Moses, was solely spiritual, and there is not one line or word in the Christian dispensation, either directly or impliedly repealing the death penalty denounced against these social monstrosities who blaspheme the name of God by uprooting in His name the dearest and holiest ties which ennoble and elevate man. In the sermon on the Mount he said, "Thou shalt not kill without a cause." I admit that the Christian dispensation repeals a large body of ceremonial and ritual law under the Mosaic dis- pensation, including the political power of the priest- hood, but the ten commandments are left as they stood when handed down from Sinai, and the socially rotten priest may be dealt with under the Christian dispensa- tion and slain wherever found. Whom God hath joined together let no manThe polluted priest is equally guilty under both dispen- sations. The fallacy lies in supposing it to be murder to destroy such a reptile. Don't insult my intelligence nor degrade my manhood by talking to me in the twaddle of the nursery about the possible purity of priest and wife in face of the proved and admitted fact he went to my house in defiance of my imperative injunction not to go there under penalty of death--in face of the fact that the wife had a written copy of this injunction when she received him in to my house with the cooing blandishments of illicit attach- ment. I would have shot him for the violation of that injunction, whether he had ever consummated his hell- ish purposes or not. The gentlemen need not distress their refined powers of hair-splitting logic about the possibility of pure in- tentions in these derelict parties. I broaden their plat- form that they may shuffle their technical feet with more grace and less derision. As Brutus said to Cassius, "I would rather be a dog and bay the moon," than live with a woman who would thus desecrate and soil the consecrated joys of home. Yes, as Othello in his mournful soliloquy said in the hear- ing of Iago, "I'd rather be a toad and feed on the vapors of a dungeon'' than keep a wife for another man's use. Poor Ophelia, in the great tragedy of Hamlet, said to Laertes, "Do not as some ungracious pastors do, show me the steep and thorny way to heaven, while he a puffed and reckless libertine, himself the primrose path of dal- liance treads." How true to life the description of this puffed up Judas. When Hooks told him I had threatened his life, he swelled up like a toad and said, "I am not hunting a fight, but I am here." Judge Byrne and others, he says, told him of the same threat. It was no secret., He came down into the city the day he visited my house in violation of my imperative injunction not to go there, and boasted that the then joint suit of myself and wife against him would not be prosecuted, and that he had more influence with my wife than I had. On cross- examination he admits these statements. I have now said all I care to say of the personal re- lations of this case to my children, lineage and self. The interest we have in it sinks into utter insignificance com- pared to that the great body of the public have in it. Society itself is on trial, at a critical period, when virtue and morality is on a fearful downward trend, without any apparent protest against the advance of the social revolution which threatens so much to the sanctity of the home and to the state itself. I will not waste anymore of my limited time by stand- ing here like an old oak defiantly hurling its shattered branches to the fierce sweep of the tempest of human passions which now roll around me, but like Scipio Af- ricanus I will carry the war into Africa, and when the smoke of the battle clears away we will see whether Rome or Carthage is master of the field of Zama. After I have replied to some of the arguments urged with more zeal and vehemence than sound judgment, against me by Mr. Turner, who opened the prosecution, I shall have much to say of a debased clergy and their baneful influence on the destinies of mankind. I will then contrast those peoples and nations who hold in the highest esteem the virtue of their women with those peo- ples who have tolerated either a laxity or a want of vir- tue in their women. It occurs to me that a broad, com- prehensive view of these pivotal questions in the des- tinies of man will shed much light and enable you to pronounce a verdict founded on wisdom and justice. (Turning to Mr. Turner.) Now, sir, hear me; be you Saxon thane or Norman lord, I throw down the gage of battle to you. In the audacity of reckless despair and falsehood you have attributed to me the basest motives that could animate the lowest order of men, in the false assertion that I shot this monster of iniqiuity to vent malice growing solely out of a lawsuit. The record shows that the letter I wrote to Forbes in the peremptory terms commanding him to cease his visits to my house and com- munication in any way with the mother of my children, was written before the commencement of the lawsuit. This fact alone puts the seal of condemnation on that false, cruelly false assertion. No innocent man, no gen- tleman would ever have violated that injunction. No loyal wife would ever have permitted that visit. No gen- tleman worthy of the dignity of husband and father would have permitted the violation of that injunction to go unpunished. No loyal wife would have refused to file the bill, which she afterwards states in a letter lying there on the table to contain no statements but that which she knows to be absolutely true. Her refusal to file that bill; her subsequent conduct from that time until this hour in executing the behests of the false priest; the secret gate; his going to my house and reading the bill I sent her to file; the conference re- sulting in the refusal to file until after I had made the enormity of this disreputable and disloyal conduct plain to her by letter from Nashville; his second visit to my house, directly after she had reluctantly filed the bill, coupled with his boast, that it would not be prosecuted and that he had more influence over her than I had, is enough to convince every man, but a fool or knave, of their improper relations. The lawsuit simply led to a disclosure of these improper relations. The idea, the base assertion that I would destroy the woman that I had loved and idolized beyond the power of expression, up to that fatal hour; that I would destroy that beautiful home that was the center of attraction and existence to me on earth; that I would irreparably injure the children I loved more than my life; simply to give expression to malice, is simply revolting to every sense and feeling of humanity above the level of the lowest or- der of brute creation. No human being who knows my life which has been an open book, could ever be induced to believe me capable of such an enormity, and I dwell on the charge and dismiss it with horror arid indignation. On the contrary, what do the undisputed proofs show this false priest capable of? Renting a respectable resi- dence in the city and establishing a trio of young wenches therein; visiting them often under the assumed character of an auxiliary aid to the ladies' aid society, and to ward off suspicion, taking his innocent wife there as a blind. The facts are as eloquent with revolting hypocrisy and crime as hell can make them. Ah, religion, what crimes are committed in thy name! To those blessed with a liberal mind and education, it seems amazing that in a Christian land, under the blaze of the nineteenth century, where the arts, science and philosophy and every branch of human attainment have encircled the world in a halo of light, that a junto of howling dervishes could either be found in or imported into Bowie county to crawl and hiss their venom at me in every nook and corner of the county, pronouncing as they advanced from church to church that their "dearly beloved Forbes is the greatest man who ever pressed his feet to the soil of Texas." "Oh, shame, where is thy blush?" Men who adopt such criminal devices to shield, protect, and cover up the crimes of the libertine are worse enemies to society than the burglar, railroad wrecker and robber. Lord Bolingbroke gave utterance to a truism when he said, "Bigotry is the inseparable companion of cruelty." The ancestors of these psalm-singing hypocrites were the demons of the dark ages who established the stake with its fagot pyre, employed implements of torture and the inquisition; and murdered multiplied thousands in the name of religion and they would employ the same agen- cies today if they had the power. On the witness stand this martyr of the church militant told you that his brother, M. D. Early, came from central Texas to his bedside to pour the oil of spiritual consola- tion into his wounded carcass. It is said, "A fellow-feel- ing makes us wondrous kind." Well, Mr. Witness, who is this Brother Early of yours? Answer, "He is the head of the Baptist missionary work in the State of Texas." From that publication lying there on the table we are told that Early is an ambitious divine, particularly in the missionary work; that the vastness of his spiritual designs in that direction em- braces darkest Africa; and that he has already advanced so far in his preliminary work as to become the father of a negro baby, the offspring of himself and a young wench who has sworn to the paternity. The paper also informs us that the mother and putative father of this young mis- sionary lived under the same roof when the foundations were laid. The paper also informs us that this pater- familias has not departed from the usual rule in such case, made and provided to cover all such accidents-- heroic denial. That was enough under the rule to satisfy every block- head belonging to the guild of saints in the church mili- tant. But the great missionary became impressed with the idea that all the world would be better satisfied with an alibi; so two of his brother ministers, each living one hundred miles away, in opposite directions, from the scene of action, sent him an alibi. Now, gentlemen, all of you may not know what an alibi is. It is a gem of pur- est ray serene, a brilliant of more precious value to crim- inals, and but few honest people would have one as a gift. But to the Snollagoster in religion who makes it a trade, the alibi brilliant is of inestimable value. It is also one of the variegated Mosaics with which hell is paved for the accommodation of gentlemen of good in- tentions, who get there by misadventure with through tickets from the amen corner. These vultures put on the plumage of the birds of para- dise and sit in judgment of men who are infinitely their superiors in all that constitutes manhood. Another one of these gentlemen in clerical robes, named Russell, whilst living in central Arkansas some years ago, stole silently and steadily into the bedroom of his innocent daughters with lecherous intent. She raised the hue and cry and a mob was about to lynch the mon- ster, but he was taken in charge by his brothers in the church and guarded and spirited away between the set- ting and rising sun, furnished with funds and sent West. His license to preach was never revoked and he never ceased preaching, and today is preaching to a congrega- tion in San Francisco. My time is too limited to rehearse a long roster of these gentlemen of the clerical gown, who have thus been pro- tected by the church instead of expelled, under the bane- ful and lawful idea that to expose them would be more injurious to religion than to cover up and protect their crimes against society. Here in your own judicial district another gentlemen of the clerical gown was pulled out of the closet on one of your railroads flagrante delicto with a sister of his church. The protection of such monsters by religionists has caused an overproduction and a powerful representation of hell in the church. They think themselves strong enough to crush any injured man who "pumps lead" into a criminal of their guild. These are the full-fledged birds of paradise who are crying for my blood; who have raised a slush fund to procure aid for the district attorney in this prosecution. Mr. Turner, who has ,just closed the opening for the prosecution, is the fortunate recipient of that fund, which has imparted unusual inspiration to his efforts, which extended through the mock heroic, high tragedy and low comedy--his success being more pronounced in the latter. The slogan of his battle cry is that five minutes is ample cooling time for any gentleman laboring under the outrage that paused me to shoot the martyred saint. The author of that declaration and all that class of hypocrites he represents, "like dead bodies thrown into the Ganges, rise as they rot and float on the surface an object of con- tagion and contamination.* "Touch the Jay and she will wince." Does Ajax cry for quarter? Does Olympian Jove re- coil when he hears the rumbling of thunder in the Alps? You, sir, have emptied your quiver of poisoned Parthian arrows at me and I did not interrupt you. It has never been my custom to interrupt an adversary when I had the opportunity to reply, although I was advised to stop you, because you abandoned the high character of advocate for that of an unsworn witness by making statements dehors the record which are at war with the evidence and truth, to support your unfounded assumptions. I will impale you, before I am done with you with the spear of Ithuriel. You have made the solemn proclamation to your wife, and all the wives and mothers and daughters and sisters of this great Southland, that the successful arts of the seducer of their virtue, the destroyer of happy homes and families ought not to inspire a feeling to destroy such monsters of longer duration than five minutes; that in that length of time the rage of father, brother, husband, ought to quiet down in calm submission to the appalling calamity. Such men as you no doubt possess that mastery over the passions. But, sir, our native Southland, labor- ing yet under the accumulated misfortunes of a long and terrible civil war; borne down as it is by the accumulated evils engendered by such a conflict, is yet the home of a nobler sentiment in the nursery of chivalrous devotion to their women and the rights of man; and few there are native to the soil which yet produces great men and noble women who would father your self-possession for the few pieces of silver contributed to you by the Judas Iscariots you represent in sentiment and forum. (Turning away from him.) I pity the little woman who bears him children. If his sainted grandmother could look down from the portals of heaven on the repres- entatives she has left on earth, the angels would gather * Here Mr. Turner rose and protested against the severity of the language, but the Court did not interfere. around her on the plains of paradise and weep with her over her misfortune.* Perhaps I have said enough on this line, but it is dif- ficult to restrain my indignation at the gentleman's per- version of facts to sustain a bastard argument that I would kill a man for a piece of dirt or for all the land the world contains, and it is equally difficult to restrain my indignation at the low brutal estimate the gentleman places on virtue and true manhood: but let it pass. Ornithologists and the children of the sea tell me of an ocean bird, called the storm king, which spreads his brave little wings and bares his breast to the storm when every fowl on quivering wings hies away for safety. If there is anything I admire in the intellectual combats of the forum, it is the noble adversary who plants his standard of defiance and comes at me like an eagle cleaving the clouds. If there is any character of man I shun in such conflicts, it is the scuttle-fish who darkens the water with his poisonous effluvia to shut out the light. I have had many conflicts with able men in the run of a long and busy professional career, but none like the present, where so many elements of depravity are con- centrated to defeat law and justice and uphold crime. Much has been said by the prosecution about the so- called decoy letter which brought Forbes to Texarkana. I told you on the witness stand that I am not the author of that letter, and that it was written by my friend with- out my knowledge or procurement. He brought me the answer, stating the time Forbes would arrive. I also told you on the stand that I would scorn to throw any doubt on my veracity by trying to evade any responsi- bility which in any way attaches to that letter, that for the purposes of this trial you may consider me the author of that letter. I was then, and had been for days, camping on the trail of the miscreant for the purpose of killing him. That letter brought him in range of my gun and I deliberately utilized it to take his life, and the first shot would have pierced his heart if he had not turned as I pulled the trigger. Three other shots struck him in the vital parts of his bull neck and I thought him dying when he fell. * Here Judge Tolbert in a mild tone of voice said "Col. Hallum, that is too severe." I scorn to place my defense on any doubtful or evasive ground and give the doubt to the prosecution. My man- hood scorns any evasion or equivocation to avoid the res- ponsibility attaching to my earnest attempt to kill the miscreant who entered my home under the sanction of friendship and religion and the hospitality such religion fosters, to become the author of its ruin and desolation. If I could have lived a thousand years, and it required all that time to find him, I would have spent it in camping on his trail for the sole purpose of destroying him. Again I enlarge the platform of the five-minute gentle- man who can cool off and simmer down to the level of the brute creation in five minutes. I am not a Darwin- ian evolute of recent extraction from ancestors with con- spicuous coat of arms to support caudal plumage. You may be surprised when I tell you that stra- tegy, both to prevent and to punish with death the crimes of the libertine, comes to us with divine sanction, and was often practiced by those who are conspicuous in the line- age of the Savior. The strategy of which I am accused begins with Abraham and Sarah, his wife. These basic rocks in the foundation of nations, dynas- ties and empires, whose blood trickled down the Cross of Calvary in the greatest tragedy the world ever saw, taught mankind that strategy, when employed either to protect or avenge virtue, is meritorious. These luminous prototypes embodied many enduring virtues in character mingled with some of the infirmities incident to human nature. It could scarcely have been otherwise. When they entered on that pilgrimage so fraught with the destinies of man through time and eter- nity, they went to Egypt. When they entered the confines of that country Abraham became much alarmed for his personal safety, and he said to Sarah: "Behold now, I know thou art beautiful to look upon; therefore, it shall come to pass, when the Egyptians see thee, that they shall say, `This is his wife,' and they will kill me but will save thee alive. Say, I pray thee, thou art my sister, that it may be well with me for thy sake, and my soul shall live because of thee." She was taken by Pharaoh to wife under the impres- sion that she was Abraham's sister, and after the Lord smote the land with plague and it became known to Pharaoh that she was Abraham's wife, he delivered her up and reproached Abraham for deceiving him, and load- ed him with presents and sent him away. He journeyed then with his family, servants and herds to the land of Gerar, and for the same motive again passed as brother and sister, and Abimilech the King took Sarah, and the Lord said unto him, "Behold, thou art but a dead man if you touch Sarah, for she is a man's wife." Abimilech plead innocence of Sarah's wifehood, and the Lord said, "I know thou did it in the innocence of thine integrity of heart, and I withheld thee from sinning and did not suffer thee to touch her, and if thou restore her not thou shall die and all that are thine." And Abimilech called Abraham and reproved him for deceiving him. Now we have the principal established with the appro- val and protection of the Creator. We have but little further to look for its application in more serious affairs. When Jacob, the grandson of Abraham, was sojourn- ing in the dominions of Prince Hamor, his daughter, Dinah, was defiled by Schechem, the son of the prince. Dinah had two noble brothers, Simeon and Levi, who felt all the indignation that can animate the soul or set the brain on fire. The seducer and his princely father offered a largess of lands and flocks and marriage as a compromise and Jacob was in favor of accepting it, and feared that if any violence was offered, the prince and his retinue of retain- ers would destroy him and his family; but the noble brothers neither feared nor cared for principalities and powers; and the seeming odds against them did not shake their resolve to kill, destroy and avenge themselves in blood. In order to get them in their power they pretended to accept the compromise, which included circumcision of the prince and retinue. By this strategem they got the seducer and his retinue of abettors in their power, and with sword smote them to death and burned up the city. Jacob was overpowered with fear and his knees smote together like Belshazzar's, and he said to his boys, "Ye make me stink among the inhabitants of the land, the Canamites and Perezites, and I being few in number, they will gather themselves together and destroy me and my house." The reply of the noble sons has come sounding down the corridors of time, emblazoned in the tragic heraldry which gave the Savior to mankind. "Shall he deal with our sister as with an harlot?" That was all. It was enough. From that tree of life drips the blood of the libertine. Long may their example animate the generous and chivalrous sons of my native soil. A little higher up on this same genealogical tree we come again to the house of King David, and find that his son Amnon defiled his daughter Tamar, and then her brother Absalom schemed and plotted two years to get Amnon into his power to slay him and finally succeeded in having him killed for the crime, and was never called to account for slaying the brute. Solomon, the son of King David, that great inspired sage of Israel, is in the direct lineage of the Savior, and was the brother of Absalom, Tamar and Amnon by a dif- ferent mother, has said to the libertine, "Can a man take fire in his bosom and his clothes not be burned! Can he go upon hot coals and his feet not be burned? He that defileth his neighbor's wife shall not be innocent. He that doeth it destroyeth his own soul. A wound shall he get, and his reproach shall not be wiped out. For jealously is the rage of man; therefore he will not spare in the days of vengeance. He will not regard any ransom, neither will he rest content." God seems to have overlooked the little Darwinian evolute and the five-min- ute gentleman from Lilliput, when he created man in his own image, with noble aspirations and duties to perform and made his home life and associations the basic work of all that is noble and great in his nature. The man who can with so much ease and facility shut himself up in an iceberg, and calmly look on the con flagration of home, that carries down the wife and mother in its awful ruins, is excluded by God from the peerage of manhood. They can never wear the coronet which adorns the higher types of men. They can never drink at the Attic fount, nor feel the inspiration of a glorious literature, nor can they ever soar on the wings of genius to Alpine solitudes. They can never feel nor appreciate the divinity of man. They can never understand and ap- preciate the tremendous influence the love of virtue in woman has exerted on the destinies of mankind. To them the whited sepulchre in clerical robes is yet a gentleman. Some men, like the youth who fired the Ephesian dome, aspire to an immortality of infamy, but happily for man kind the contagion of their nature never reaches better men. What an immeasurable gulf lies between the sparsely settled district inhabited by the five minute gentry and that class of chivalrous men whose characters were ex- emplified the other day by Judge Donaldson, of Ken- tucky, in the trial of a case parallel to this, and under a similar statute. He said to the jury: "Gentlemen, this case is governed by the higher law, you will render a verdict of not guilty." With him the puny statute of man repealing an ordinance of God for the government of the world was not of primal sanction. Such men are the heritage of the state. His name ought to be carved in letters of gold on the columns of the Pantheon. In delivering that charge he ascended the rugged heights of Sinai, and on its flaming summit shook hands with his God. But I am not making my defense against your statute by asking you to disregard it. It is of ample scope, and the evidence is sufficiently luminous to repel all idea of a felony, as you will see when the judge charges you and expounds the law. As to the assault under your statute, I am guilty, and I don't ask you to disregard it, but think you ought to impose the minimum fine. I will only notice one more assertion by the gentleman who opened the prosecution. Feeling himself driven into the last ditch, with his magazine of poison exhausted and his fortress blown up, he tells you why he insults you and the people of Texas. He says, "It is felt in the air, and whispered from man to man through the halls and corridors of this temple of justice that Hallum cannot be convicted of a felony." Then he threw himself into that melodramatic, serio- comic attitude for which he is distinguished, and tells this jury that "you are scabs! scabs!" Failing to per- suade, he seeks to intimidate and drive. Let me say to the gentleman, that the descendants and representatives of Crockett, Travis, and Houston and the revolutionary heroes of Texas, who left you a heritage of glory and renown to hand down from generation to generation as the cycles of time roll on, can neither be intimidated nor driven into anything their manhood and judgment does not approve: In the audacity of despair he tries to drive you to that standard he represents and exhibits in himself. Whence comes that public opinion, which has risen up like Banquo's ghost in the pathway of the gentleman, to thwart the hellish designs of the hellish hypocrites he re- presents with so much fidelity? It came like the rush of mighty waters on my first trial, when the light was turn- ed on in the robust vigor of unvarnished truth. It came when an honest and enlightened people learned that their minds had been wretchedly abused by a junto of cal- umniating priests who did not scruple to sacrifice me to cover up the crimes of the basest of mankind. It came when the people learned that the prosecution embodied all that is wicked and depraved in man. Higher Types of Manhood. relation to society, to nation and the welfare of man. Look over the vast landscape of human history in every age and development of man, and wherever you find him treading the highways of greatness, whether with his genius or the sword, you will find that he loves and at any sacrifice will protect the virtue of woman, and you will find that this love is always especially connected with his patrotism and love of country. These primal elements in all the higher types of men luminously mark the upward and downward trend of nations. The Jews under the Mosaic dispensation were a great and a patriotic people. They imposed the death penalty for wife seduction. Read the19th and 20th chapters of Judges and you will find the national trait strongly de- veloped when the tribe of Benjamin refused to deliver up the miscreants who had defiled one wife. Three great battles were fought and 60,000 men were slain, and the tribe of Benjamin nearly wiped out. True, like all other people, they had their decades of corruption and advance and decline. Look at the history of pagan nations. Long before the advent of Christianity, Rome had a temple erected for the worship of virtue, where the Vestal Virgins presided. As long as their women worshipped in that shrine their heroic sons carried the eagles of Rome to conquest and empire. No people, ancient or modern, knew better than the Romans that the strongest foundations of an endur- ing state spring from the virtues which bloom around the sacred altars of home. In the Augustan age of that once mighty people they made a law, which was in force six hundred years, au- thorizing the injured husband and relatives to slay the libertine who invaded his home. The Emperors Augustus and Julian both promulgated this law in a pagan age. How near they came to God when he handed down the tablets from Sinai. The noble Greeks, a thousand years before that, from the Areopagos, for the same purposes, promulgated a sim- ilar law. It conduced more than all else to make that people the focal and the radiating center of a civilization, and a literature that has rendered the names of her poets, orators, philosophers, statesmen and warriors immortal. It was the foundation of that spirit of martial glory that carried her banners to the Indus and laid Asia at her feet. Their noble women, of all their thirty thousand pagan gods worshiped none more than the Vestal Virgins, who ministered at the shrine of sexual purity in the radiance of light that never died out. The inspiration they trans- mitted to their sons crowned them with the laurels of of [sic] transcendent achievement. * Look at this master representation of the genius of Greek character in Parian marble; sculptured by a noble Greek three thousand years ago. It is unsurpassed in the genius of its execution by either of the great masters, Phydias, Angelo or Raphael. Observe the face of the False Priest in his dying agony as he is being crushed to death with his lecherous victims of lust by the monster serpent. That speaks more eloquent than tongue can paint of the odium and horrid contempt in which a great people held the Judas Iscariot in clerical robes who be- trayed confidence in the ruin of women. It was carved in marble when Greece was "winging her eagle flight against the blaze of every science; with an eye that never *Here the speaker uncovered and held up before the jury a fine crayon copy of the False Priest. winked and a wing that never tired." Her scrutinizing and profound researches in philosophy, her Attic litera- ture, clothed in the charms of elevated morality, will de- light mankind as long as the higher types inhabit the globe. Their love of home and the sanctity of the mar- riage relation was powerfully illustrated in the Trojan war. Paris, prince of Troy, and son of Priam, king of Troy, abducted Helen, the beautiful wife of Menelaus, king of Sparta, and carried her to the fortress of Troy, and refused to give her up. All the states of Greece con- federated against Priam, and brought their land and naval forces into action to avenge the outrage. The siege of Troy lasted ten years. Ajax, Achilles, Agamem- non, Hector and other celebrities were actors in this war, and the fortress was finally taken by the strategy of the wooden horse. Vast treasure and rivers of blood were ex- pended to avenge the injury. That was the foundation of Homer's Iliad, the wandering minstrel of Chios Isle, who gave the world its finest epic poem. It is not nec- essary for me to say to you that the religious, cool head- ed, five-minute men were not in it. The Syrians were a great people when the Chaldean star gazers were studying the rudiments of astronomy. They were a patriotic and heroic people through a long cycle of centuries. They fought the Chaldean, the Baby- lonian, the Persian, the Egyptian and Roman empires. But finally "Syria became a country where courage in man and virtue in woman were unknown." When the virtue of their women became extinct, they became a nation of five-minute men, demonstrating what I said that virtue in women is inseparable from the heroic vir- tues that create great people. "History repeats itself." The Romans with the spoils of an hundred nations accumulated vast wealth, and with it came that laxity of morals and virtue in both sexes, until virtue in their women became the exception and not the rule, and courage and patriotism in the men declined in a ratio with the loss of virtue in their women, until great and powerful Rome, which aspired and claimed to be mistress of the world, crumbled into one vast chaotic mass of ruin. "Ill fares the land to hastening ills a prey, The Romans, finally became intoxicated with the vast power they attained, and although a great people they became the assailers of the virtue of women in nearly all their conquered provinces, and this abuse of women led to many insurrections.* "Heap still the fetters, bar close the gate; Patient as sheep we yield us up unto your love and hate. But by the shades beneath us and by the Gods above; Add not unto your cruel hate your still more cruel love. Then leave the poor plebian his single tie to life, The sweet, sweet love of daughter, of sister and of wife. The gentle speech, the balm for all that his vexed soul endures. The kiss in which he half forgets such a yoke as yours. Still let the maiden's beauty swell the father's breast with pride, Still let the bridegroom's arm enfold an unpolluted bride. Spare us in the inexplicable wrong, the unutterable shame. That turns the coward's heart to steel, the sluggard's blood to flame; Lest when our last hope is fled, ye taste of our despair. And learn by proof, in some wild hour, how much the wretched dare." The Sabines were a religious and virtuous people and for the treachery of the Romans in taking and abusing their women, they fought them until blotted from the map of Italy, Roman writers have celebrated their vir- tues in history and in song. Now we come to the ethnology and chronology which carries us to the primeval roots of our own race--the Ger- manic. Profound historians and ethnologists--Guizot, Arnold, Creasy--agree that we are of the Germanic race. The Anglo-Saxons are certainly of Ger- man graft; but for them there could not have been an English ancestry for Americans. They inhabited the countries watered by the Rhine and Mosel. No people in Europe ever more loved the domestic virtues which hal- lowed their homes; no people ever showed greater res- pect to female character.** They have always upheld this basic element of great- ness with the greatest tenacity of purpose. Overrun, overpowered and crushed by the Romans for hundreds of years, yet they constantly rose in rebellion at every seem- * Macaulay has beautifully and pathetically described the suffer- ings the libertine patricians brought on the plebians, and the insurr- ections it caused in the early days of the people. ** The great historian and ethnologist Creasy says of the Germanic race: "I allude to their personal freedom and regard for the rights of man, and the respect paid by them to the female sex, and the chastity for which their women were celebrated among the people of the North. These were the foundations of that probity of character, self respect and purity of manners which may be traced among the Germans and Goths, even during the pagan times, and which, when their sentiments were enlightened by Christianity, brought out those splendid traits of character which distinguish the age of chivalry and romance." ing opportune time. Then they had no national or- ganization, mere tribal relations. Rome had shattered the kingdoms of the world, had surpressed with her gigantic power every great rebellion; the great Mithri- dates had fallen, and Hannibal, the greatest military genius that ever opposed Roman arms, had fallen and it looked hopeless to rebel against Rome; but there was a mighty genius of that primeval fatherland, the first Washington of our race. Arminius, whose wife and child had been taken away from him. Other German chiefs had suffered similar indignities. Arminius consolidated, confederated, organized and led to battle in his master genius for war, and utterly annihilated the Roman legions and allies under Varus in the year 9. The emperor, Augustus Caesar, in the agonies of des- pair beat his head against the wall and cried, "0, Varus! give me back my Roman legions." The battle destroyed the western empire of Rome, and Germanic stock finally conquered and ruled the Roman people 400 years. Like Bonaparte when he crossed the Alps, Arminus[sic] was but twenty-seven years old when he tore the plumage from the Roman eagles, which they had worn eight hun- dred years. Historians and poets love to dwell on the virtue of that people and to "linger on the summit" of that great chieftain's name. Tacitus, the greatest of Roman his- torians, tells us that Thresnelda, the wife of Arminius, was possessed of the same great soul of her husband, and that Arminius was the liberator of his country. What a pleasure it is to look down twenty centuries on the heroic virtues and struggles of our primeval ancestors. I am trying to aid you to a thorough insight to the comprehensive greatness and designs of the Creator in arming his children with divine authority to slay the de- stroyer of family ties, and that you may further under- stand what it has cost ours, the greatest race of man, to crystallize out of the blood, treasures and suffering of centuries, the glorious adage, that: "A Man's Home is His Castle," where no invasion is tolerated, without the sanction of law. I have sworn you that the blood of the libertine drips from the family tree of the Savior and I think it clearly manifest that the designs of the Creator of the higher types of men never could have been accom- plished without planting in his breast the strongest pas- sion of love for the purity and sacred character of home. And I think it equally manifest that the little creature who can keep cool over the destruction of his home, that carries down the purity of the wife and mother of his children, has never planted his little foot nor made a track in the highways of man's greatness, nor has he ever written a chapter in the history of the world that is not covered with shame. Again, when oriental despotism under the lead of Attila, that master mind, and perhaps the most consum- mate general the Asiatic races ever produced, was seek- ing with powerful strides to change the drama of the world with his vast horde of nomadic Huns from the high plans of Asia and the subjects of twenty conquered kingdoms, a terrible crisis confronted the civilization and institutions of Europe. He advanced to the north of France and the "terrible renown" of this "scourge of the world" sent dismay and despair from the north to the Mediterranean sea. The once vast power and resources of Rome was then in the sere leaf of decline. She had accomplished her mis- sion in the drama of the world and was making her last struggle against the seal of fate, and Attila aspired to be her successor by establishing oriental despotism in Europe. Valentinian III, emperor of the West, and Attila knew where the probably decisive power lay, and both made overtures to Theodric, king of the Visigoths, then the greatest of the Germanic stock. The Romans and our primeval ancestors, under Theodric, confronted Attila on the plains of Chalons, A. D. 451. Theodric commanded the left wing, and crushed the right wing of Attila and drove back the center where Attila command- ed in person, whilst Aretus, the Roman general, failed to break Attila's left wing. The glory of that great bat- tle fell to our race and saved Europe from Asiatic des- potism. In the year 732, two hundred and eighty years after the battle of Chalons, another equally momentous crisis con- fronted Europe. The followers of Mohammed, within one hundred years after his death, destroyed the eastern empire of Rome, crossed into Europe, overran Spain and crossed the Pyrenees, spreading terror and desolation, under Abderahman, one of the greatest generals that ever fought under the banners of the Koran. They had con- quered Persia, Syria, Egypt, Africa and Spain, in an un- broken career of victory. With an army of veterans they came to lay Europe under the yoke of the Moslem and thus precipitate the mighty conflict between the Cross and the Crescent. Gaul, because of incompetent rulers did not make any appreciable resistance. The Austrasian Franks, the bravest of the Germanic stock, under Charles Martel, their brave young duke, a master general, with an army vastly inferior in numbers, met the hitherto victorious Saracens in the decisive bat- tle of Tours in the south of Gaul and annihilated the fol- lowers of the Koran. The Rhine and Mosel will chant a lullaby to the fame of Arminius and Martel as long as their waters roll on to the sea. Through mighty struggles and fields of slaughter, we find in our race the gradual renaissance of all that was glorious and heroic in Greek and Roman character; and we find its foundation planted in the enduring chastity of their women, whose heroic sons worshiped and defen- ded the scanctity[sic] of their family altars and became the embodiment of the highest types of man. "The hand that rocks the cradle rules the world." The Romans first invaded Britain 55 B. C., and held the island 470 years, but our rude ancestors were never con- quered; they were overpowered, never subdued. They rose again and again on every possible occasion and fought the Romans 470 years and countless thousands perished by the sword. When beaten in battle they re- tired to morass, and from morass to mountain defile, half naked and often nearly starved, yet their heroic spirit was never conquered. The licentious Romans ab- used their women, for whom the Britons cherish a pro- found respect. To avenge the abuse of Queen Boadicae and her two daughters they arose and in a few days slew 70,000 Rom- ans and drove them from the island; but the Romans re- turned with an augmented army and fought another great battle. Queen Boadicae with her daughters drove down the line of battle and lent inspiration to those rude an- cestors of ours, worthy the proudest eras of Grecian and Roman history; proud landmarks on the highways of time, worthy of the great destiny of the race. The super- ior skill of the veteran legions of Rome triumphed, and the queen took poison rather than be taken to grace a Roman triumph. Through all the shifting scenes of the historic drama, for many centuries the people ever struggled to maintain the integrity of their women. The time came when the feudal lord and a dissolute clergy could appropriate the virtue of the common people without responsibility, but their struggles continued and they fought hundreds of battles to correct that and other abuses and drenched the British Isle in blood. Finally the Saxon and Norman lines of our race united into one great national stream and rose in rebellion against King John, one of the mean- est of the mean kings of the Plantagenet line, and on the 15th of June, 1215, in that isle in the river of life, the Runnymede forced him to sign the great charter of En- glish liberties. That instrument and the unyielding ten- acity with which our race in every quarter of the globe have maintained its integrity, opened up the greatest possibilities and has led to the noblest achievements of the human race. But the struggle to maintain its inte- grity has been great and its invasions many. That chart of freedom crystallized the struggles and blood of fifteen centuries into an axiom which is one of the glories distinguishing our race, which you and I may well hope and pray will be transmitted to unborn genera- tions. "A Man's Home is His Castle." That axiom, with its kindred inspirations, was nailed to the masthead of the little Mayflower, and came across a tempest-tossed ocean with the Pilgrim Fathers to the wilds of New En- gland, and to the James with the Cavaliers. It nerved a heroic people in a Spartan age. It lighted up the torch of a revolution against encroachment at Concord and Lexington and it spoke in the thunders which shook the earth at Bunker Hill. It sustained a patriot soldiery at Valley Forge that awful winter when their naked feet were bleeding on the frozen ground. It descended with the conquering sweep of an eagle on the British army at Saratoga, and wreathed King's Mountain in festoons of laurel and immortels. It rose triumphantly above the rattle of musketry and roar of cannon at Yorktown, where it was again canon- ized and rebaptized in American blood, and today it shines second in luster only to the star of Bethlehem. "A Man's Home is His Castle," and I hope that the sons of my native soil will maintain it in the integrity with which it was proclaimed from the flaming summit of Sinai, and written on the hearts of all the higher types of man. And I feel assured that they will do it as long as they can pull a trigger or drive a dagger to the heart of a libertine. Yes, they will do it in defiance of all the puny mandates of man, as long as rivers flow to the sea and until the ocean heaves her last billow to the storm. We are yet fighting the battles of civilization; my struggles today may be yours tomorrow. have claimed to be the salt of the earth; and a vast ma- jority of them have made credulity their capital and re- ligion a trade from the little howling evolute in our midst, back to the crushing of human bones under the wheels of Juggarnaut and the burning of helpless victims on funeral pyres in India, to the Egyptian worship of storks and onians, crocodiles and bulls, up to the priest- hood who condemned and led the Savior to the crucifix- ion. When in power they have been relentless tyrants and scourgers of the earth. When subject to the favors or frowns of authority, they have been fawning sycophants at the feet of power and willing instruments of crime. They have never led the vanguard of civilization, but have followed in the wake of public opinion, and molded creeds to suit the conditions which confronted them. They rose into power with the decline and fall of the Roman empire, and had the most splendid opportunities ever en- joyed by any people or class of mankind, to elevate and ennoble the human race. They became the political and spiritual masters of all Europe, and used that vast power solely for their own aggrandizement. They manufactured a thousand of bigots to where they ever enlarged the intellectual foundations of one man, and their factories are still running full time. They closed the schools of philosophy and learning because ignorance and credulity was their stock in trade. They laid their mailed hand on Galileo, whose splendid genius took for the scope of his powers the landscape of the solar system and the interpretation of the laws governing the universe. They suppressed the readings of the Bible, and as far as possible all knowledge of the existence of the New Testament. Even Martin Luther, the great reformer, did not know of its existence until he discovered it by acci- dent long after he had been a priest. They turned back the dial or human progress a thousand years and brought on the Dark Ages. They led the procession at the slaughter of Saint Bartholomew and lighted the torch to the martyr at Smithfield. They were the greatest state criminals during the long rein of the houses of Planta- genet, Tudor and Stuart, and did the evil work for those evil masters. To protect themselves from the crime of adultery they required twelve eyewitnesses to the crime. They ministered to the disgraceful lust of kings in the name of religion as their shield and justification. Their state crimes led the fathers who founded our government to separate their powers from that of the state. I love a pure and undefiled religion, and would not ex- change my simple faith in the Redeemer for all the wealth and principalities of earth. I know many great and good men in the ministry, and large numbers of sincere Chris- tians of both sexes, for whom I entertain profound res- pect, whilst language is not strong enough to express my loathing and contempt for the hypocrite. My time is out, but the court will indulge me a moment longer whilst I say something of Judge Dillard in the gratitude of my heart. To me he was the Good Samar- itan. In him I realize that "kind hearts are more than coronets." When that grand old Roman saw the storm and the waves dashing around me he came to me without price or reward and has been a powerful breakwater in cor- recting an abused public sentiment by stating the facts. Animated by that love of truth and justice which have molded his life into that nobility of sentiment and char- |