I am at best a poor interpreter of La Mancha's actions. His character was built upon a scale beyond my measurements, beyond, I think, the standards by which the common run of men must estimate affairs. There are hill districts of India where a respectable woman must keep several husbands; of North America where a church elder may have several wives without affronting his neighbors; of the Appalachian Mountains where a man who shirks the slayings of his family blood-feud earns the contempt of his mother; and the world has never seen such ferocious dueling to the death as that considered right in the southwestern states. The standards of the old England or the new quite fail to take the measurements of even our fellow-citizens; and the whole world's moralities are local to times and places, not pivots on which the planets are swung by eternal law.
So there are men whose lives are guided by sanctions of a conscience above the plane where I obey, who are the clean, effective and useful instruments of powers far beyond my understanding. I should need to be Cæsar before I could justly wield a Roman Empire, levying wars to purge distracted provinces, or milling nations between the millstones of an over-crowded peace.
Perhaps the reader knows whether my friend La Mancha did right or wrong. I don't.
And so the judge summed up:
"I am here," he said, "gentlemen of the jury, as an authority on the common law and an impartial umpire to instruct you before you give your judgment.
"The prisoner's friend disclaimed the right of this court to deal with Indians as British subjects. I find that the prisoner's friend has misread the treaty made by Her Majesty with the Blackfoot nation. This man is subject to the common law.
"He was brought here as an innocent man, charged with capital felony, free to prove his innocence and entitled to go back to the world, with your verdict establishing his character before all mankind.
"He told you that he is guilty. You have heard the overwhelming evidence of the facts confessed. But is he guilty? Is he sane and responsible for these proven felonies? On that you must pass your judgment and give your verdict. He confessed himself a public danger, but if he is insane the public must be guarded while he remains, during the queen's pleasure, under medical treatment.
"The defense raises a second question equally grave. It is an axiom that ignorance of the law excuseth no man; but, gentlemen, an axiom, like a diamond, may be hard, impure and flawed. How can we expect this savage to comprehend our statutes, obey our ordinances and enjoy our liberties? And yet, apart altogether from the customs of our people expressed in common law, deep down at the foundation of all human life, is that instinctive universal wisdom which proclaims that for the common good the slayer should be slain. Even the plea of native red Indian custom condemns this man, surrendered by his tribesmen to our justice.
"Next, we have to consider an appeal to something in us all more potent than our reason, a trait of man not human but divine, our sense of pity. You have, no doubt, been moved, as I was, swayed out of all reason, by the prisoner's fine sincerity, his perfect manliness, his unusual argument, the purity of his thought, the rare beauty of its expression. This man is not, as the Crown pleads, brutal or depraved, but, as our hearts claim, noble. We have to deal, not with a common felon convicted of mere outrage, but with a man, moved by barbaric warrior motives to acts of war against us. My impulse, and yours, if I read you rightly, is to pardon.