Page:The Green Bag (1889–1914), Volume 05.pdf/114

 Rh you a chance to show what you can do? If good old Homer nods at times, why may not a hard-worked lawyer doze when he is tired?" We sincerely con gratulate our witty friend that he did not confuse Alexander with Ray Hamilton.

NOTES OF CASES. DYING DECLARATIONS. — It is well settled that the dying declarations of the victim of murder or manslaughter are receivable in evidence against his assailant. It would seem that they should also be receivable in favor of the assailant, and such is un doubtedly the better doctrine. It was however held to the contrary in Moeck v. People, 100 Ill. 242; S. C. 39 Am. Rep. 38, in which the court approved the exclusion of the following declarations : •' He did not wish accused hurt for what he had done, and said accused had done nearly right," observing that this "affords no evidence of anything more than a truly Christian spirit on the part of one who had been unjustly done to death, and who in his dying ago nies was willing to forgive the malefactor." Hut in Mattox v. United States, 13 Sup. Ct. Rep. 50, it was held that on a trial for murder, when there is admitted without objection, as a dying declaration, a statement by deceased that he did not know who shot him, it is error to exclude evidence of a further statement, made immediately afterwards, that he saw the parties who shot him, and that defendant was not among them. The court, by the chief-justice, observed : " Dying declarations are admissible on a trial for murder, as to the fact of the homicide and the person by whom it was committed, in favor of the defend ant as well as against him. i East, P. C. 353; Rex v. Scaife, i Moody & R. 551; United States v Tay lor, 4 Cranch C. C. 338; Moore v. State. 12 Ala. 764; Com. v. Matthews, 89 Ky. 287, 12 S. W. Rep. 333." To the same effect is People;•. Knapp, 26 Mich. 112; Moore v. State. 12 Ala. 764; Bish. Cr. Law, § 1207; Browne Cr. Law. 21. MARY WASHINGTON'S TOMB. — A very irreverent speculator down in Virginia has been trying to corner the last resting-place of the honored grandmother of our country. Although, as we understand, the Mother of Presidents had not taken the most pious care of that ground, and had never completed a projected monument in memory of the good woman. — in which inattention, however, she was by no means so remiss as is the city of New York in respect to General Grant. — yet this sacrilege was more than the Vir ginians could stand, and the interference of the Su preme Court having been implored on the ground of fraud, that tribunal sat down very heavily on the transgressors, and read them some good morals and some wholesome denunciation. We extract the fol lowing choice passages from the report in the " Vir ginia Law Journal " : — "The record in this case presents for review by this court the sacrilegious and shockingly shameful spectacle of a controversy and traffic over the grave and sacred ashes of Mrs. Mary Washington, the honored and revered mother of the transcendent man of all the ages, who in the annals of the world is without a prototype, a peer, or a parallel. Mary, the mother of Washington, — a deeply pious, intel lectual, resolute woman, — refused to surrender her supre macy by residing with any of her children, and chose to live by herself on her farm in Stafford County, opposite Fredericksburgh, surrounded by her slaves and domestics, in the exercise of her systematic and beneficent authority, until her illustrious son urged upon her his solicitude for her personal safety, and his apprehension that the capture of her person by the enemies of her country, to be held as a hostage, might some time constrain him, as the com. mander-in-chief of the Revolutionary patriots, to elect be tween public duty and filial affection. She removed to thevillage of Fredericksburgh, on the south side of the Rappahannock River, and resided there from 1776 to 1789 in a plain wooden structure, framed and weatherboarded, within three squares of the ' Kenmore ' residence of Col. Fielding Lewis, the husband of her daughter Betty. There, at the age of 83 years, on the 25th day of August, 1789, she died, and was buried on the apex of a hill which over looks the valley of a little stream of water, which, on the western side of Fredericksburgh, winds its way to the Rappahannock River. There, tradition says, she resorted frequently, during her fourteen years of solitary life, for meditation and prayer, and sat often for hours upon the ledge of rocks that crops out on the top of the hill; and that she gave directions to be buried there, on the land then the property of her son-in-law, Col. Fielding Lewis. About the year 1831 — forty-two years after Mrs. Washington was buried — an association was organized to erect a monu ment to her memory over her grave; and Gen. Andrew Jackson, the renowned President of the United States, who had been compatriot in arms with her great son, and whose youthful blood had been shed in the Revolutionary War for the independence of their common country, was invited to lay the corner-stone. And on the 7th day of May, 1833, with civic ceremonies and military pageant worthy of the occasion, the venerated chief-magistrate of the United States, who, the illustrious Thomas Jefferson said, 'had filled the measure of his country's glory,' in the name and in behalf of all the people of this great country, performed the signal act of public gratitude and affection, and laid the corner-stone of the monument which marks the grave of the mother of the ' Father of his Country,' and thus, in the most solemn and impressive manner, dedicated to public and pious uses forever the consecrated spot where the remains of this honored woman had reposed for forty-five years in the grave where the pious duty and reverence of her children had laid her. From that day to this no right or claim of private owner ship has ever been exercised over it or made to it. In