him at the risk of her life. It is
impossible for you to doubt his distress on the morning when he
committed this act. We well know what terrible havoc such distress
can make in weak and highly nervous people. It was all the work of a
moment. The rest has followed, as death follows a stab to the heart,
or water drops if you hold up a jug to empty it. Believe me,
gentlemen, there is nothing more tragic in life than the utter
impossibility of changing what you have done. Once this cheque was
altered and presented, the work of four minutes--four mad minutes
--the rest has been silence. But in those four minutes the boy
before you has slipped through a door, hardly opened, into that great
cage which never again quite lets a man go--the cage of the Law. His
further acts, his failure to confess, the alteration of the
counterfoil, his preparations for flight, are all evidence--not of
deliberate and guilty intention when he committed the prime act from
which these subsequent acts arose; no--they are merely evidence of
the weak character which is clearly enough his misfortune. But is a
man to be lost because he is bred and born with a weak character?
Gentlemen, men like the prisoner are destroyed daily under our law
for want of that human insight which sees them as they are, patients,
and not criminals. If the prisoner be found guilty, and treated as
though he were a criminal type, he will, as all experience shows, in
all probability become one. I beg you not to return a verdict that
may thrust him back into prison and brand him for ever. Gentlemen,
Justice is a machine that, when some one has once given it the
starting push, rolls on of itself. Is this young man to be ground to
pieces under this machine for an act which at the worst was one of
weakness? Is he to become a member of the luckless crews that man
those dark, ill-starred ships called prisons? Is that to be his
voyage-from which so few return? Or is he to have another chance, to
be still looked on as one who has gone a little astray, but who will
come back? I urge you, gentlemen, do not ruin this young man! For,
as a result of those four minutes, ruin, utter and irretrievable,
stares him in the face. He can be saved now. Imprison him as a
criminal, and I affirm to you that he will be lost. He has neither
the face nor the manner of one who can survive that terrible ordeal.
Weigh in the scales his criminality and the suffering he has
undergone. The