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PREFACE TO VOLUME TEN

Though the trial of Edward D. Worrell (p. 1) is full
of striking and interesting features, it is the great
speeches to the jury, of Wright and Bay that entitles
it to over 150 pages of this volume. And this suggests
the question, how comes it that the speeches to the
jury in great criminal trials are no longer given space
in the columns of our daily newspapers or preserved to
the public in some permanent form as soon as deliv-
ered? When Bufas Choate or Daniel Webster spoke
in Massachusetts or Prentiss or Marshall in Kentucky
or Wright in Missouri or Sampson or Brady in New
York, they spoke not only to the crowd in the court-
room but to the American public, Their orations ap-
peared almost verbatim in the press and were later
reported in pamphlet form and were as eagerly pur-
chased in the book-stores as the best selling works of
fiction are today. When, for example, Daniel Webster
made his great speech for the Commonwealth on the
trial of the Knapps for murder in the little town of
Salem (see 7 Am. St. Tr.), not only did it appear in
full in the local papers, but it was reported in book
form in Massachusetts and in New York by at least
half a dozen different publishers. And this continued
to be the practice until about the close of the civil war.
Tt still exists in England; a speech to the jury by a
leader of the bar in an important criminal trial will
appear the next day in the newspapers almost word
for word. What is the reason for this neglect by our
press of the oratory of our bar? Is it that commer-
eialism has killed eloquence and that it has become
extinct like the dodo? that our modern advocate has

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