"And yet we consider ourselves the greatest people in the world,—or at any rate the honestest."
"I think we are; but laws and their management have nothing to do with making people honest. Good laws won't make people honest, nor bad laws dishonest."
"But a people who are dishonest in one trade will probably be dishonest in others. Now, you go so far as to say that all English lawyers are rogues."
"I have never said so. I believe your father to be as honest a man as ever breathed."
"Thank you, sir," and Staveley lifted his hat.
"And I would fain hope that I am an honest man myself."
"Ah, but you don't make money by it."
"What I do mean is this, that from our love of precedent and ceremony and old usages, we have retained a system which contains many of the barbarities of the feudal times, and also many of its lies. We try our culprit as we did in the old days of the ordeal. If luck will carry him through the hot ploughshares, we let him escape though we know him to be guilty. We give him the advantage of every technicality, and teach him to lie in his own defence, if nature has not sufficiently so taught him already."
"You mean as to his plea of not guilty."
"No, I don't; that is little or nothing. We ask him whether or no he confesses his guilt in a foolish way, tending to induce him to deny it; but that is not much. Guilt seldom will confess as long as a chance remains. But we teach him to lie, or rather we lie for him during the whole ceremony of his trial. We think it merciful to give him chances of escape, and hunt him as we do a fox, in obedience to certain laws framed for his protection."