A blue coat does not make a man any better; it ought not to make him any worse. They are men; Mr. Fleet is a man, Mr. Mullaly is a man, Mr. Medley is a man, and they are not to be stood up in a row and characterized as good or bad because they are officers, but upon what you think of them as men. There is another thing that troubles my friends—I now include the learned advocate who opened this case as well as the distinguished counsel who closed it—and which perhaps from your ordinary and accustomed channel of thought may have troubled you. I speak of it frankly, for many honest men have been heard to say—I have heard many an honest man say, that he could not believe circumstantial evidence. And I respect the honesty of the man who says it: But, gentlemen, the crime we are trying is a crime of an assassin. It is the work of one who does his foul deeds beyond the sight and hearing of men. All it means is this: That when one sees the crime committed or one hears the crime committed then the testimony of him that sees or hears is the testimony of a witness who saw it or heard it and is direct evidence. All other evidence is circumstantial evidence. That is the exact distinction. Did you ever hear of a murderer getting a witness to his work who could see it or hear it? Murder is the work of stealth and craft in which there are not only no witnesses, but the traces are attempted to be obliterated. What is called sometimes circumstantial evidence is nothing in the world but that presumption of circumstances, it may be one or fifty. There isn’t any chain about it: the word “chain” is a misnomer as applied to it; it is the presentation of circumstances from which one is irresistibly driven to the conclusion that crime has been committed. Talk about a chain of circumstances! When that solitary man had lived on this island for twenty years and believed that he was the only human being there and that the cannibals and savages that lived around him had not found him nor had not come to his island, he walked out one day on the beach, and there he saw the fresh print in the sand of a naked foot.