'Men make boast'—the voice came clear from the monument—'that an English citizen is tried by his peers. What woman is tried by hers?'
'She mistakes the sense in which the word was employed,' said a man who looked like an Oxford Don.
But there was evidently a sense, larger than that one purely academic, in which her use of the word could claim its pertinence. The strong feeling that had seized her as she put the question was sweeping the crowd along with her.
'A woman is arrested by a man, brought before a man judge, tried by a jury of men, condemned by men, taken to prison by a man, and by a man she's hanged! Where in all this were her "peers"? Why did men, when British justice was born—why did they so long ago insist on trial by "a jury of their peers"? So that justice shouldn't miscarry—wasn't it? A man's peers would best understand his circumstances, his temptation, the degree of his guilt. Yet there's no such unlikeness between different classes of men as exists between man and woman. What man has the knowledge that makes him a fit judge of woman's deeds at that time of anguish—that hour that some woman struggled through to put each man here into the world. I noticed when a previous speaker quoted the Labour Party, you applauded. Some of you here, I gather, call yourselves Labour men. Every woman who has borne a child is a Labour woman. No man among you can judge what she goes through in her hour of darkness.'
Jean's eyes had dropped from her lover's set white face early in the recital. But she whispered his name.
He seemed not to hear.
The speaker up there had caught her fluttering breath, and went on so low that people strained to follow.
'In that great agony, even under the best conditions that money and devotion can buy, many a woman falls into temporary mania, and not a few go down to death. In the case of this poor little abandoned working girl, what man can be the fit judge of her deeds in that awful moment of half-crazed temptation? Women know of these things as those know burning who have walked through fire.'
Stonor looked down at the girl at his side. He saw her hands go up to her throat as though she were suffocating. The young face, where some harsh knowledge was struggling for birth, was in pity turned away from the man she loved.
The woman leaned down from the platform, and spoke her last words with a low and thrilling earnestness.