efence
must be masters of the subject involved. A trial for poisoning means
an exhaustive study not only of analytic chemistry, but of practical
medicine on the part of all the lawyers in the case, while a plea of
insanity requires that, for the time being, the district attorney shall
become an alienist, familiar with every aspect of paranoia, dementia
praecox, and all other forms of mania. He must also reduce his knowledge
to concrete, workable form, and be able to defeat opposing experts
on their own ground. But such knowledge comes only by prayer and
fasting--or, perhaps, rather by months of hard and remorseless grind.

The writer once prosecuted a druggist who had, by mistake, filled
a prescription for a one-fourth-grain pill of calomel with a
one-fourth-grain pill of morphine. The baby for whom the pill was
intended died in consequence. The defence was that the prescription
had been properly filled, but that the child was the victim of various
diseases, from acute gastritis to cerebro-spinal meningitis. In
preparation the writer was compelled to spend four hours every evening
for a week with three specialists, and became temporarily a minor expert
on children's diseases. To-day he is forced to admit that he would not
know a case of acute gastritis from one of mumps. But the druggist was
convicted.

Yet it is not enough to prepare for the defence you believe the accused
is going to interpose. A conscientious preparation means getting ready
for any defence he may endeavor to put in. Just as the prudent general
has an eye to every possible turn of the battle and has, if he can,
re-enforcements on the march, so the prosecutor must be ready for
anything, and readiest of all for the unexpected. He must not rest upon
the belief that the other side will concede any fact, however clear
it may seem. Some cases are lost simply because it never occurs to the
district attorney that the accused will deny something which the State
has twenty witnesses to prove. The twenty witnesses are, therefore, not
summoned on the day of trial, the defendant does deny it, and as it is a
case of word against word the accused gets the benefit of the doubt and,
perhaps, is acquitted.

No case is properly prepared unless there is in the court-room every
witness who knows anything about any aspect of the case. No one can
foretell when the unimportant will become the vital. Most cases turn
on an unconsidered point. A prosecutor once lost what see