392
THE GREEN BAG
perhaps as fully taxed and certainly never as eloquently displayed. And then, too, the thrilling words were supplemented and given added force by the flashing eye and the consummate action of the orator. Though a finished actor, he was natural — he felt all that he acted. In the outset he complimented the jury and congratulated them that they lived in a country where the right of trial by jury was in vogue, mentioned the fierce struggles to obtain this' right, and then discussed it in the following felicitous manner: "You may wonder why it is they have been thus solicitous to preserve this right of trial by jury. You may inquire why they have not rather left it to the courts to try men who are charged with crime. The judges on the bench are usually able and honest men — men of superior wisdom to those who ordinarily compose a jury; men of greater knowledge of law, and men of undoubted integrity. "It is not from any distrust of the judges, or fears that they might be swayed improperly, that this right has been pre served, but from a deeper and wiser motive. It is not because the people are equally learned with them but because they are less learned. It is because the law desires no man to be molested in his life or liberty until the popular sanction has been given to his sentence, and his cause pronounced upon by a jury of his peers. The court is expected to render all necessary assistance in stating the law; but his cause, in passing through the minds and hearts of his equals who are trying it, will be divested of all nice technicalities and subtle analogies, and decided on its simple merits, and according to the dictates of reason. The life of a man should be taken on no other judgment. You may lay down the law like a problem in Euclid; you may take one fact here and another there; connect this principle and that proposition, and then from one to the other reason plausibly and even logically that a man
should receive sentence of death. But it was to avoid all this that this glorious right was kept inviolate. It was to bring the accused face to face with his accusers and to suffer only a jury of his equals, with their warm hearts and honest minds, to pronounce upon a cause-involving his life or his liberty." He then proceeded to comment briefly on the evidence, showing the inconsistencies and unreliable character of the testimony given by the frightened schoolboys who alone had witnessed the tragedy; intimated that they had been instructed, and having finished the discussion of the facts considered the law applicable to the case. In reply to some of Carpenter's bitter attacks he delivered this sublime plea for justice tem pered with mercy: " He would have you tell the judge of the quick and the dead, when you stand at his tribunal, how man fully you performed your duty by sending your fellow-man to the gallows. He appre hends that it will go a great way to insure your acquittal there and your entrance to the regions of eternal bliss, if you are able to state that you regarded no extenuating plea — took no cognizance of the passions and infirmities of our common nature — showed no mercy, but sternly pronounced his irrevocable doom. I understand that it would be more likely to send you in a con trary7 direction. I understand that a lack of all compassion during life will hardly be a recommendation there. I understand that your own plea will the^be for mercy; none, we are taught, can find, salvation without it, — none can be saved on their merits. But according to Mr. Carpenter's idea, you are to rely there, not upon that mercy for which we all hope, but on your own merits in convicting Matt Ward. Don't you think the gentleman rather failed in the argumentative portion of his point? It seems to me he would have done' better to take you somewhere else for trial. "I have heard or read a story from one of those transcendental German writers, which tells us that when the Almighty designed to
