The Master of Man: The Story of a Sin

by Sir Hall Caine

"If they hang him for that they'll hang a man for anything."

Against this sympathy for the accused, Stowell had risen to make his reply for the Crown.

He did not deny the dead woman's transgression. It was true that she must have known when she married the prisoner that she was about to become the mother of a child by another man. But if that moral fact could be urged against the wife, was there nothing of the same kind that could be advanced in her favour?

She had been cruelly betrayed and abandoned. Looking to the future she had seen the contempt of her little world before her. What had happened? In the dark hour of her desertion the prisoner had come with the offer of his love and protection. It was in evidence that for a time she had held back and that he had pressed himself upon her. None could know the secret of the dead woman's soul, but was it unreasonable to think that standing between the two fires of public scorn and the prisoner's affection she had said to herself, as poor misguided women in like cases did every day: "He loves me so much that he will forgive me whatever happens."

But had he forgiven her? No, he had killed her, wilfully, cruelly, brutally, not in the heat of blood, but after long deliberation—he, the big powerful brute and she the weak, helpless, half-naked woman—the woman who had been faithful to him since the day he married her, the woman he had sworn to love and cherish until death parted them.

No, the plea of moral justification was rotten to the heart's core, and had nothing to say for itself in a Court of Law. The defence had urged that it was founded on the laws of nature—that marriage implied chastity on the woman's part, and this woman had come to her husband unchaste. On the contrary, it was founded on the barbarous law of man—the infamous theory that a wife was the property of her husband and he was at liberty to do as he liked with her.

A wife was not the property of her husband. He was not at liberty to do as he liked with her. There was no such thing as the unwritten law. What was not written was not law. And if, as the result of the verdict in that court, it should go forth that any man had a right to kill his wife in any circumstances—to be judge and jury and accuser and executioner over her—the reign of law and order in this island would be at an end, no woman's life would be secure, the daughter of no member of that jury would any longer be safe, and human society would dissolve into a welter of civilised savagery—the worst savagery of all.

The effect of Stowell's reply had been overwhelming. The jury had either been frightened or convinced, and even the prisoner himself, during the more intimate passages, had held down his head as if he felt himself to be the vilest scoundrel on earth.

Among the advocates (they had reached the station by this time, got into their carriages, and lit up their pipes) opinion was more divided. The younger men were enthusiastic, but some of the older ones thought the closing speech for the Crown had been false in logic and bad in law.

One of the latter, with a special cock of the hat, (it was old Hudgeon, the young men called him "Fanny" now), sat with his shaven chin on the top of his stick and said: