nclusive, exclude every other reasonable
hypothesis. The District Attorney has further told you that
circumstances cannot lie. Of all his statements that one and that one
alone is correct. Circumstances cannot lie. But witnesses can. It is
from them that circumstances are obtained. And though they furnish a
million circumstances, what are these circumstances worth if they
themselves are unsound? How unsound that reptile Harris is, you have,
I believe, been enabled to judge. But even otherwise, even though the
testimony of that saurian seem to you probable, I may remind you that
the most probable things often prove false, for the reason that if
they were exempt from falsity they would cease to be probable; they
would be certain.

"Now what certainty has the District Attorney brought you? Instead of
excluding every other reasonable hypothesis, he has opened the door to
a dozen hypotheses infinitely more reasonable than his own. Except
that the obligatory instrument does not appear to have been found, he
has adduced nothing to show that the deceased did not commit suicide.
He has adduced nothing to show that he was not robbed. The caretaker
has testified that he was away from the park ten or fifteen minutes.
The policeman who returned with him has testified that when he got
there the gate was open. In the interim anyone may have entered, gone
through the suicide, bagged his pistol for further booty and away.

"No, the District Attorney has not excluded these hypotheses, he has
confined himself to picturing this defendant as a husband jealous of
the deceased. But assuming that he was, how many other husbands may
not have been jealous of him also? The bullet in evidence, the bullet
extracted from the brain of the deceased, is one which, from a
calculation of its lands and grooves, may or may not have come from a
thirty-two calibre pistol. Anyway a thirty-two calibre pistol is among
the exhibits. But how many more such pistols are there in this great
city? The ownership of one is not a proof of crime. Nor is the fact
that the body of the deceased was found in front of this defendant's
residence proof either. On the contrary. The park wherein it lay is a
parallelogram, and a body in it would be practically in front of every
other house in the square. How many jealous husbands reside in these
houses I am not competent to say, but I am competent to tell you that
the prosecution might just as well have arraigned any other reside