text:  Our very tenacity of our liberties may tend to render these proceedings occasionally abortive; and the twelve men composing a jury of the country though possibly all their sympathies would be at once enlisted in behalf of a wronged and injured subject may unconsciously to themselves demand more stringent proof in cases where the sovereign power appears before then as the party; and more especially when the offence is of an impersonal nature and where the theory of the constitution rather than the person or property of individuals is the object of aggression