then be instances of their acquitting contrary to the general
sentiment, where that sentiment is unimpassioned; but we much doubt
whether there has ever occurred a single example of a jury convicting a
person in whose favor the sympathy of a whole community was warmly and
earnestly expressed. Of such sympathy Captain Wilde had none; for to the
great majority he was known only as the exciseman, and as such was an
object of hostility. Not that this hostility at any time took the form
of insult and abuse,--for we are proud to say that outside of the large
towns such disgraceful exhibitions of feeling are unknown,--but it
left the minds of the general mass liable to be operated on by all
the suspicious circumstances of the case, and by the slanders of the
personal enemies of the accused.

On the 23d of November, an immense crowd of people, both men and women,
were assembled in the court-house at ---- to witness a trial which was
to fix a dark stain on the judicial annals of Kentucky, and in which,
for the thousandth time, a court of justice was to be led fatally astray
by the accursed thing called Circumstantial Evidence, and made the
instrument of that most deplorable of all human tragedies, a formal,
legalized murder. It is one of the most glaring inconsistencies of our
law, that it admits, in a trial where the life of a citizen is at stake,
a species of testimony which it regards as too inconclusive and too
liable to misconstruction to be allowed in a civil suit involving, it
may be, less than the value of a single dollar. True, it is a favorite
maxim of prosecutors, that "circumstances will not lie"; but it requires
little acquaintance with the history of criminal trials to prove that
circumstantial evidence has murdered more innocent men than all the
false witnesses and informers who ever disgraced courts of justice by
their presence; and the slightest reflection will convince us that this
shallow sophism contains even less practical truth than the general mass
of proverbs and maxims, proverbially false though they be. For not only
is the chance of falsehood, on the part of the witness who details the
circumstances, greater,--since a false impression can be conveyed with
far less risk of detection by distortion and exaggeration of a fact than
by the invention of a direct lie,--but there is the additional danger of
an honest misconception on his part; and every lawyer knows how hard
it is for a dull witness to distingui