“Goodness me! This is not Mr. Beecher?”
“No, madam,” Dr. Collyer answered, “it is not. I hope Mr. Beecher is in a cooler place.”
It is not necessary that a lawyer should be eloquent to win verdicts, but he must have the tact which turns an apparent defeat to his own advantage. One of the most successful of verdict winners was Sir James Scarlett. His skill in turning a failure into a success was wonderful. In a breach-of-promise case the defendant, Scarlett’s client, was alleged to have been cajoled into an engagement by the plaintiff’s mother. She was a witness in behalf of her daughter, and completely baffled Scarlett, who cross-examined her. But in his argument he exhibited his tact by this happy stroke of advocacy: “You saw, gentlemen of the jury, that I was but a child in her hands. What must my client have been?”
He was a young man—a candidate for an agricultural constituency—and he was sketching in glowing colors to an audience of rural voters the happy life the laborer would lead under an administration for the propagation of sweetness and light. “We have not yet three acres and a cow, but it will come. Old-age pensions are still of the future, but they will come.” Similarly every item of his comprehensive program was endorsed by the same parrot cry. Then he went on to talk of prison reforms. “I have not yet personally,” he said, “been inside a criminal lunatic asylum.” Then there was a voice from the back of the hall, “But it will come.”
The judge had had his patience sorely tried by lawyers who wished to talk and by men who wished to evade jury service.
“Shudge!” cried a little German in the jury box.
“What is it?” demanded the judge.