The judge bestowed a chiding glance upon the attorney, but replied to the minister:
"A certain liberty is allowed the prosecutor."
"But that liberty should not be a license to defame!" protested the defendant.
"Am I to be permitted to proceed with my argument or not?" bawled Searle in his most bullying manner, while he glared at the audacious minister.
"You may proceed," replied the Court, affecting not to notice the disrespect with which it had been addressed.
Searle continued, lapsing now into an argumentative strain.
"The defendant himself has said that the case against him is without a flaw. He has had the effrontery to urge that your Honor accept the testimony against him as true testimony. He has only argued that if we are to believe the witnesses for the prosecution, we are also to believe him. I say—I affirm with all the force at my command—that we are not to believe him at all!
"I ask your Honor to consider first the motive for his testimony. The man is hopelessly involved. The charge of burglary is a simple one, compared with the broader indictment of moral profligacy which the whole community is at this moment prepared to find against him. Ruin stares him in the face. His pose is shattered. His disguise is penetrated. If he goes from this court room to the identification bureau of which he has spoken in his mawkish plea for sympathy, as I believe he will go, he goes to be catalogued with criminals, and to be damned forever in the esteem of his neighbors.
"To avert that, would not your Honor expect this defendant to be willing to perjure himself without a qualm? Will a man who has lived a lie before a whole community for five years hesitate to add another in an endeavor to avert his impending fate? Will a man who has stolen the jewels of his trusted friend hesitate to swear falsely in denial of such an act? Will a man who has worked upon the sympathy of his friends to secure large sums of money for a purpose so doubtful that it is undisclosed— Will he hesitate to work upon the sympathies here by words and implications, by innuendoes that are as false to religion as to fact?
"Your Honor knows that he would not so hesitate. Your Honor knows, through long familiarity with the law of evidence, that the testimony of a defendant in his own behalf, because of his intense interest in the outcome of his case, is always to be weighed with extreme care.