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86 X. AMERICAN STATE TRIALS.

all perish in the same way. The fate of the unhappy girl
tells the whole story. If we cannot profit by it, the instruc-
tions of a wider experience would be useless. If the advocate
in her ease had supposed the actual truth of the transaction,
would he have been heeded? Would not his suggestion have
been dispatched by a sneer of the prosecution, or killed by three
words: ‘This is far fetched’’f Would the jury have given
up the lie which seemed so plausible, for the truth which
seemed so improbable? The law told them to give up; but
they could nott The law told them so in the fourth rule,
but they would not heed its mandate! Were they honest?
Yes! in all probability honest and trying to do right; but
fascinated, as all men are, by circumstantial evidence, they
eould not surrender the delusion which their own reasoning
ereated. They could not feel and acknowledge their own
fallibility, and because they could not, they murdered an inno-
cent girl. The pride of intellect makes a conviction wrought
by cireumstantial evidence the strongest of all our convictions,
and it is therefore the last which we are willing to surrender.
Do you not pity thet jury? Did they sleep in peace after
they knew the truth which they had rejected? How plainly
they saw the truth ‘‘afterwerds’’! How easy it was to see
the true hypothesis “‘afterwards’’?! But what word so aad
as that word “‘afterwards’’? The law of the fourth rule is
intended to rob ‘‘afterwards’’ of its power to mourn. It
is designed to put it ont of the power of ‘‘afterwards,’’ to
disclose what ‘‘possibility’? did not embrace. The fourth
rule observed by juries will check these sad mistakes, this
shedding of innocent blood. Have we not warning enough
in history, in judieial annals, in daily life, to show us that
circumstances can lie, do lie and will lie to the end of life?
They lied to Jacob. What but the lie of cireumstantial
evidence made the aged patriarch rend his garments, clothe
his loing in sackeloth, and utter the wail of agony which
would not be confessed, ‘‘I will go down into the grave, unto
my son, mourning!’’ The case is instructive to show the
power of falsehood told by circumstantial evidence. ‘‘It is
my son’s coat, an evil beast hath devoured: him; Joseph is

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