“It’s what I call reasonable, ’Squire. There are two men on it who would not hang Cain, were he indicted for the murder of Abel.”
“Quakers, of course?”
“Not they. The time was when we were reduced to the ‘thee’s’ and the ‘thou’s’ for this sort of support; but philanthropy is abroad, sir, covering the land. Talk of the schoolmaster!—Why, ’Squire, a new philanthropical idee will go two feet to the schoolmaster’s one. Pro-nigger, anti-gallows, eternal peace, woman’s rights, the people’s power, and anything of that sort, sweeps like a tornado through the land. Get a juror who has just come into the anti-gallows notion, and I would defy the State to hang a body-snatcher who lived by murdering his subjects.”
“And you count on two of these partisans for our case?”
“Lord no, sir. The District Attorney himself knows them both; and Davis’s counsel have been studying that list for the last week, as if it were Blackstone in the hands of a new beginner.[beginner.] I can tell you, ’Squire Dunscomb, that the jury-list is a most important part of a case out here in the country!”
“I am much afraid it is, Timms; though I never examined one in my life.”
“I can believe you, sir, from what I have seen of your practice. But principles and facts won’t answer in an age of the world when men are ruled by talk and prejudice. There is not a case of any magnitude tried, now-a-days, without paying proper attention to the jury. We are pretty well off, on the whole; and I am tolerably sanguine of a disagreement, though I fear an acquittal is quite out of the question.”
“You rely on one or two particularly intelligent and disinterested men, ha! Timms?”
“I rely on five or six particularly ignorant and heated partisans, on the contrary;—men who have been reading about the abolishing of capital punishments, and who in gin’ral, because they’ve got hold of some notions that have been worn out as far back as the times of the Cæsars, fancy themselves philosophers and the children of progress. The country is getting to be full of what I call donkeys and racers; the donkey is obstinate, and backs going up hill; while the racers will not only break their own necks, but those of their riders too, unless they hold up long before they reach their goal.”
“I did not know, Timms, that you think so much on such subjects. To me, you have always appeared to be a purely working-man—no theorist.”