culty. Much of it was devoted
to impugning the veracity of the witnesses for the prosecution. He
solemnly declared that it was not his business to say who committed the
murder, and that he had no desire to throw any imputation on the other
servants in the house, and he abstained scrupulously from giving any
personal opinion on the matter; but the drift of his argument was that
Courvoisier was the victim of a conspiracy, the police having concealed
compromising articles among his clothes, and that there was no clear
circumstance distinguishing the suspicion against him from that against
the other servants.[39]

The conduct of Phillips in this case has, I believe, been justified by
the preponderance of professional opinion, though when the facts were
known public opinion outside the profession generally condemned it. Some
lawyers have pushed the duty of defence to a point which has aroused
much protest even in their own profession. 'The Advocate,' said Lord
Brougham in his great speech before the House of Lords in defence of
Queen Caroline, 'by the sacred duty which he owes his client, knows in
the discharge of that office but one person in the world--that client
and none other. To save that client by all expedient means, to protect
that client at all hazards and costs to all others, and among others to
himself, is the highest and most unquestioned of his duties; and he must
not regard the alarm, the suffering, the torment, the destruction which
he may bring upon any other. Nay, separating even the duties of a
patriot from those of an advocate, and casting them, if need be, to the
wind, he must go on, reckless of consequences, if his fate it should
unhappily be to involve his country in confusion for his client's
protection.'

This doctrine has been emphatically repudiated by some eminent English
lawyers, but both in practice and theory the profession have differed
widely in different courts, times and countries. How far, for example,
is it permissible in cross-examination to browbeat or confuse an honest
but timid and unskilful witness; to attempt to discredit the evidence of
a witness on a plain matter of fact about which he had no interest in
concealment by exhuming against him some moral scandal of early youth
which was totally unconnected with the subject of the trial; or, by
pursuing such a line of cross-examination, to keep out of the
witness-box material witnesses who are conscious that their past lives
are not