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

312 X. AMERICAN STATE TRIALS.

appeared on the outside as a whited sepulcher, who was a5
rotten on the inside as it was possible to be.

So he has got no good character, I submit, never had it; he
has got a reputation—that’s what people say and think about
you—and he has got a reputation for good conduct only
among those people that don’t kmow his character. But sup-
pose that he had a good character; that would amount to
nothing. David of old was a great character until he put old
Uriah in the fore-front of battle in order that he might be
{dlled—that Uriah might be Killed, and David take his wife.
Judas Iscariot was a good character, and one of the Twelve,
until he took the thirty pieces of silver and betrayed our Lord
Jesus Christ. Benedict Arnold was brave, enjoyed the confi-
denea of all the people and those in charge of the management
of the Revolutionary War until he betrayed his country.
Since that day his name has been a synonym for infamy.
Oscar Wilde, an Irish Knight, a literary man, brilliant, the
author of works that will go down the agee—Lady Winde-
mere’s Fan, De Profundis—which he wrote while confined
in jail; a man who had the effrontery and the boldness, when
the Marquis of Queensbury saw that there was something
wrong between this intellectual giant and his son, sought to
break up their companionship, he sued the Marquis for dam-
ages, which brought retaliation on the part of the Marquis for
criminal practices on the part of Wilde, this intellectual
giant; and wherever the English language is read, the effront-
ery, the boldness, the coolness of this man, Oscar Wilde, as he
stood the cross-examination of the ablest lawyers of Eng-
land—an effrontery that is characteristic of the man of his
type—that examination will remain the subject matter of
study for lawyers and for people who are interested in the
type of pervert like this man. Not even Oscar Wilde’s wife—
for he was married and had two children—suspected that he
was guilty of such immoral practices, and, as I say, it never
would have been brought to light probably, because committed
in secret, had not this man had the effrontery and the bold-
ness and the impudence himself to start the proceeding which