The dæmonic quality was dominant here, as is the case always when the gospel of force has its dealings with human nature. Few had suspected that this old judge, with his brusque manners and his great barking irascible voice was no longer fit to fill his position. His lionlike exterior was no more than the livery of his dignity. He was not the man to face a crisis, when above all things an iron nerve and an implacable will were needed to impose restraint upon a jury and an advocate who were in danger of trampling underfoot the accepted rules of decorum and procedure. And the week before the judge had buried his youngest daughter. When Northcote’s gaunt eyes were turned upon this old man, who was trembling violently under his ermine, the tears began to course down his face.
“My God, he’s settled Bow-wow,” said the fat barrister on the back bench.
“Always was a senile old fool at bottom,” said his companion. “That young bounder ought to lose his wig and gown.”
“Shut up! He’s speaking again.”
XXVII
THE PERORATION
“It is too much the custom, my friends,” Northcote continued to the jury when Mr. Weekes had sat down as spasmodically as he had got up, “to regard this divine mystic of whom I have spoken as a supernatural being whose name can only be mentioned with propriety in the presence of an elaborate ritual. That fetish dies hard, my friends, but dying it is, for if ever a human being walked this earth, whose life and opinions are a great poem that deserves to be recited in our bosoms and our businesses during every hour that we dwell, it is the life and opinions of him who has already given his verdict in this case. There are very few things that are of any importance to us upon which we have not his pronouncement in one form or another; and though that pronouncement may not always be coincident with the technical lawyer’s law of the time, which is understanded of no man, least of all of themselves, these obiter dicta of his, delivered upon the spur of the occasion, have already outlasted kings, dynasties, and nations; and they are likely to endure when court-houses, jury-boxes, and scaffolds have long ceased to be.
“A few centuries ago such words as I am now addressing to you would have sent me to the lions, and you also would have been torn in pieces for having deigned to listen to them. It is not a hundred years since small children were hanged in this country for stealing five shillings. A hundred years before that a woman was burned at the stake for the practice of witchcraft. It was the custom to disembowel those who were guilty of a felony; to break on the wheel those who did not hold orthodox political opinions; and to burn, maim, cut off the heads, and inflict indescribable physical torments upon any person because of his religious views.
“I am going to ask you, my friends, how these monstrous enactments were overcome. By the lawyers who drew their fees from the Crown to put them in practice? Not so. By those educated minds that conducted the business of the state? Not so. These unspeakable crimes committed in the name of justice were overcome by a handful of prophets, seers, and reformers, who arose in Israel. They were common and unrefined, of small education, and less culture; poor and obscure herdsmen and fishermen, a pedlar by the wayside; the keeper of a public-house; a small tradesman in Lambeth; a miserable grocer of Spitalfields; a wretched old tinker who passed the choicest part of his days in Bedford jail. This very Jesus himself, the foreman of this jury which is sitting with you in the box, which at this moment urges these words to my lips, was a common rustic by trade, a carpenter. And you will remember that he paid for the extreme unorthodoxy of his religious and political views by crucifixion upon the tree.
“The tree has gone, my friends, but he remains. I say the tree has gone. That tree has gone, but as mankind in the present imperfect stage of its development, does not dare as yet to trust itself without a tree of some kind to lean upon, a substitute has been provided for that cross of wood upon which it nailed the redeemer of his kind. And it seems to me that if the divine mystic of whom I am speaking were again to roam the hills of Galilee, his fate would be the same to-day as it was yesterday. In the present phase which has been attained by our sympathies with those who share the burden of our so dark and so inscrutable inheritance, it would be extremely easy for some learned Treasury counsel in the performance of his duty to the Crown, to reënact the supreme tragedy of a world which is filled with tragedies.
“At the present time there is still a tree standing in England upon which we nail women. They may be guilty of dark offences, as were the associates of that Nazarene Jew of whom I have spoken; their fate, according to the written statutes, may be sound in equity; some wretched Magdalene in falling by the way may have stained the pavements of the street with blood. But if we, her peers and coadjutors, are to continue at this time of day to visit her with reprisals, I am forced to believe, my friends, that all we most cherish in our national life will perish. And I think I discern by that which is written in your faces that you are of this opinion also.