070 Slide – American State Trials 1918 Volume X Leo Frank Document

38 X. AMERICAN STATE TRIALS.

dignation so deep, and so universal, and Providence supplied
what indignation could not furnish.

Thus in limine my friend would have your feelings pre-
judge the ease. He would have you enlightened by the judg-
ment—the foregone conclusion—of a ‘‘whole people,” and
awe you against any resistance of their decree. Into this sa-
ered temple, whither Justice has retired, calmly, severely,
carefully to weigh, to deliberate and mature her even judg-
Ment, my friend madly rushes and flings the passions of a
multitude into the seales.

His classic memory alone ought to have saved him from the
error. When Orestes, wet with a father’s blood, fled from
the Temple of the Pythoness, pursued by the Furies, they
ceased their howl so soon as their intended victim embraced
the Statue of Pallas; nor did they enter the Amphyctionic
Council, which sat afterwards to decide the fate of the refugee.
With the Greeks, Passions stood mute in the presence of Wis-
dom, and the genius of that people shut them quite out of the
Temple of Justice. The spirit of our law is wiser than Minerva,
and this tribunal is grester, more sacred, than the Amphye-
tionie Council of Greece.

To transfer the excitement of Warren County to this, is
to defeat a statute, dictated by every sense of justice a noble
commonwealth may feel. I do not pass upon ‘‘the people of
Warren.’’ I neither censure nor praise their excitement
touching the homicide of Gordon. I only know that, worthy
or unworthy, it has no business here—it is an alien element,
out of place. It cannot come here legally, nor be brought
here except at the expense of justice. This ‘‘excitement’’
was adverse to the purposes of legal justice; for that cause
only the law sent the accused away from Warren County, to
be tried in some spot out of the reach of a disturbing element.
The law passed no censure on the people of Warren, nor do
I, and this tribunal was not the foram in which my friend
was called upon to stand forth as the champion of the people
of Warren. His prowess was not challenged to any such
effort, nor can he lawfully here seek to vindieate ‘‘a whole
people”? by dwelling on the noble qualities of the deceased.