“Which you did not take, Tom?”
“Why not? It is my trade, and I live by it. Why not take her fee, if you please, sir? Does the Widow Updyke teach you such doctrines? Will you drive about town for nothing? Why not take her fee, Master Ned?”
“Why not, sure enough! That girl has bewitched me, I believe; and that is the solution.”
“I’ll tell you what, Ned, unless there is a stop put to this folly, I’ll make Mrs. Updyke acquainted with the whole matter, and put an end to nuptials No. 3. Jack is head and ears in love, already; and here you are flying off at a tangent from all your engagements and professions, to fall at the feet of an unknown girl of twenty, who appears before you, on a first interview, in the amiable light of one accused of the highest crimes.”
“And of which I no more believe her guilty, than I believe you to be guilty of them.”
“Umph! ‘Time will show;’ which is the English, I suppose, of the ‘nous verrons,’ that is flying about in the newspapers. Yes, she has money to buy three or four journals, to get up a ‘sympathy’ in her behalf; when her acquittal would be almost certain, if her trial were not a legal impossibility. I am not sure it is not her safest course, in the actual state of the facts.”
“Would you think, Dunscomb, of advising any one who looked up to you for counsel, to take such a course?”
“Certainly not—and you know it, well enough, McBrain; but that does not lessen, or increase, the chances of the expedient. The journals have greatly weakened their own power, by the manner in which they have abused it; but enough still remains to hoodwink, not to say to overshadow, justice. The law is very explicit and far-sighted as to the consequences of allowing any one to influence the public mind in matters of its own administration; but in a country like this, in which the virtue and intelligence of the people are said to be the primum mobile in everything, there is no one to enforce the ordinances that the wisdom of our ancestors has bequeathed to us. Any editor of a newspaper who publishes a sentence reflecting on the character or rights of a party to a pending suit, is guilty, at common law, of what the books call a ‘libel on the courts of justice,’ and can be punished for it, as for any other misdemeanor; yet, you can see for yourself, how little such a provision, healthful and most wise—nay, essential as it is to justice—is looked down by the mania which exists, of putting everything into print. When one remembers that very little of what he reads is true, it is fearful to reflect that a system, of which the whole merit depends on its power to extract facts, and to do justice on their warranty, should be completely overshadowed by another contrivance which, when stripped of its pretension, and regarded in its real colours, is nothing more than one of the ten thousand schemes to make money that surround us, with a little higher pretension than common to virtue.”
“‘Completely overshadowed’ are strong words, Dunscomb!”
“Perhaps they are, and they may need a little qualifying. Overshadowed often—much too often, however, is not a particle stronger than I am justified in using. Every one, who thinks at all, sees and feels the truth of this; but here is the weak side of a popular government. The laws are enforced by means of public virtue, and public virtue, like private virtue, is very frail. We all are willing enough to admit the last, as regards our neighbours at least, while there seems to exist, in most minds, a species of idolatrous veneration for the common sentiment, as sheer a quality of straw, as any image of a lover drawn by the most heated imagination of sixteen.”