Edgar Wallace

“ Don”t you miss the very essence of a murder trial, the mournfulness of it and the horror of it? Here’s a feller been killed and not once has the prosecution talked about ‘this poor man struck down in the prime of life’ or said anything that made you look at the prisoner to see how he takes it. ”

“ It would be madness to expect a civilized country to revert to the barbarism of an age in which death was the penalty for every other crime, and I will not insult your intelligence by denying that such a return to the bad days was ever suggested by me. ”

“ The Judge nodded gravely and the public prosecutor rose to cross-examination.
“Before I ask you any question,” he said, “I can only express myself as being in complete agreement with his lordship on the policy of allowing your identity to remain hidden.” The young man bowed.
“Now,” said the counsel, “let me ask you this. How long have you been in association with the Four Just Men?” ”

“ The leader for the Crown was a little man with a keen, strong face and a convincing dramatic delivery. He seemed to be possessed all the time with a desire to deal fairly with the issues, fairly to the Crown and fairly to the prisoner. He was not prepared, he said, to labour certain points which had been brought forward at the police-court inquiry, or to urge the jury that the accused man was wholly without redeeming qualities.
He would not even say that the man who had been killed, and with whose killing Manfred was charged, was a worthy or a desirable citizen of the country. ”

“ But there has come into existence a spurious form of humanitarianism, the exponents of which have, it would appear, lost their sense of proportion, and have promoted the Fear of Pain to a religion; who have forgotten that the Age of Reason is not yet, and that men who are animal in all but human semblance share the animal”s obedience to corrective discipline, share too his blind fear of death—and are amenable to methods that threaten his comfort or his life. ”

“ If it had pleased them to have taken an abstract view of this or that offence, and they had said this or that man is deserving of punishment, we, the representatives of the established law, could not have questioned for one moment the justice of their reasoning. But we have come into conflict on the question of the adequacy of punishment, and upon the more serious question of the right of the individual to inflict that punishment, which results in the appearance of this man in the dock on a charge of murder. ”

“ The inequalities of the law are notorious, and I recognize the impossibility, as society is constituted, of amending the law so that crimes such as we have dealt with shall be punished as they deserve. ”

“ As the final witness withdrew, the judge announced an adjournment and the prosecuting counsel was summoned to his lordship’s private room.
In the cells beneath the court, Manfred received a hint at what was coming and looked grave.
After the interval, the judge, on taking his seat, addressed the jury:
“In a case presenting the unusual features that characterize this,” he said, “it is to be expected that there will occur incidents of an almost unprecedented nature. The circumstances under which evidence will be given now, are, however, not entirely without precedent.” ”

“ Let us suppose you were the head of a great business firm controlling a thousand workmen, with rules and regulations for their guidance and a scale of fines and punishments for the preservation of discipline. ”