James Fenimore Cooper

“ Jack, himself, being a young limb of the law comprehended what his uncle meant, and had the grace to colour, too, at the manner in which he had manifested his ignorance of the great national compact. With a view to relieve himself from his dilemma, he cried, with a ready dexterity,—
“Well, since this won’t do, I must try the jury. ‘The trial by jury, the palladium of our liberties.’ How do you like that, sir?”
“Worse than the other, boy. God protect the country that has no better shield against wrong, than that which a jury can hold before it.” ”

“ The most extraordinary part of the affair, was the circumstance that the harp became popular; the very sentiment, act, or thing that, in one condition of the common mind, is about to be ‘cut down and cast into the fire,’ becoming in another, all that is noble, commendable, or desirable. The crowd about the windows of the gaol, for the first few hours after the acquittal, was dying to hear the prisoner sing and play, and would gladly have tolerated the harp and a ‘foreign tongue’ to be thus gratified.
But Mary Monson was safe from all intrusion, under the locks of the delighted Mrs. Gott. ”

“ The judge slips into the county town almost unknown; lives at an inn amid a crowd of lawyers, witnesses, suitors, jurors and horse-shedders, as Timms calls them; finds his way to the bench as best he may; and seems to think that the more work he can do in the shortest time is the one great purpose of his appointment. Nevertheless, these men, as yet, are surprisingly incorrupt and intelligent. How long it will remain so, no one can predict; if it be for a human life, however, the working of the problem will demonstrate the fallibility of every appreciation of human motives. ”

“ No, no, Jack, marry a woman; which means a kind, gentle, affectionate, thoughtful creature, whose heart is so full of you, there is no room in it for herself. Marry just such a girl as Anna Updyke, if you can get her.”
“I thank you, sir,” answered John, colouring. “I dare say the advice is good, and I shall bear it in mind. What would you think of a woman like Mary Monson, for a wife?”
Dunscomb turned a vacant look at his nephew, as if his thoughts were far away, and his chin dropped on his bosom. ”

“ There is no great difference, as I can see.”
“Yes you can, and will, too, as soon as you look into the matter. A lawyer is paid for a known and authorized assistance, and the public recognises in him one engaged in the interests of his client, and accepts his statements and efforts accordingly. But the conductor of a public journal sets up a claim to strict impartiality, in his very profession, and should tell nothing but what he believes to be true, neither inventing nor suppressing. In his facts, he is merely the publisher of a record; in his reasoning, a judge; not an advocate.” ”

“ We scarcely adopt one plan that shall secure everybody’s rights and liberties, than another is broached, to secure some newly-discovered rights and liberties. With the dire example before them, of the manner in which the elective franchise is abused, in this anti-rent movement, the sages of the land have just given to the mass the election of judges; as beautiful a scheme for making the bench coalesce with the jury-box as human ingenuity could invent! ”

“ Nature has given us sympathy, and compassion, and a desire to alleviate misery; yet most of us like to look upon it, as a mere spectacle, when we have neither the wish nor the power to be more than useless spectators. Thousands will assemble to see a man hanged, when all know that the law has a grasp too tight to be unloosed, and that the circle of the gallows is no place for feelings of commiseration. But, so it is; and many a female, that day, who would have gladly alleviated any distress that it was in her power to lessen, sat there, a curious and interested observer of all that passed ”

“ The first indication that the former now got of the very serious character of the struggle that was about to take place between them, was in the extraordinary civility of saucy Williams when they met in the bar-room of the inn they each frequented, and which had long been the arena of their antagonistical wit and practices.
“I never saw you look better, Timms,” said Williams, in the most cordial manner imaginable; “on the whole, I do not remember to have ever seen you looking so well. You grow younger instead of older, every day of your life. ”

“ Man or woman, money is a dangerous thing, when we come to consider it as a part of our natural existence; for it tempts us to fancy that money’s worth gives rights that nature and reason both deny. I believe I should have been much happier, were I much poorer than I am.”
“But those who are rich are not very likely to rob!”
“Certainly not, in the sense that you mean, my dear. Send Marie Moulin on some errand, Anna; I wish to tell you and Sarah what I think of this fire, and of the deaths for which I am now on trial.” ”

“ It is very possible for a woman of forty to love, and to love with all her heart; though the world seldom takes as much interest in her weaknesses, if weakness it is, as in those of younger and fairer subjects of the passion. To own the truth, Mrs. Updyke was profoundly in love, while her betrothed met her inclination with an answering sympathy that, to say the least, was fully equal to any tender sentiment he had succeeded in awakening. ”

“ Alas! that women should ever so mistake their natural means to influence and guide, as to have recourse to the exercise of agents that they rarely wield with effect; and ever with a sacrifice of womanly character and womanly grace. The person who would draw the sex from the quiet scenes that they so much embellish, to mingle in the strifes of the world; who would place them in stations that nature has obviously intended men should occupy, is not their real friend, any more than the weak adviser who resorts to reputed specifics when the knife alone can effect a cure. ”

“ Ah! my dear mamma, if you could understand how very strong the humble get to be in time, you would throw aside your cherished independence, and rely on other means to secure your happiness!”
Perhaps Mildred was as much struck with the circumstances under which this rebuke or admonition was given as with the advice itself. It had an effect, however, and Dunscomb coming in aid of his niece, this singular woman was gradually drawn from the exaggerated notions she had ever entertained of herself and her rights to the contemplation of her duties, as they are exercised in humility. ”

“ It is monarchical and aristocratic, and all that is vile and dangerous, to see power exercised by any but the people; those whom the constitution and the laws have set apart expressly to discharge a delegated authority being obliged, by clamours sustained by all the arts of cupidity and fraud, to defer to the passing opinions of the hour. No one knew this better than Timms, who had just as lively a recollection as his opponent that this very judge was to come before the people, in the next autumn, as a candidate for re-election. ”

“ When one reflects on the great amount of injustice that is thus inflicted, without even the most remote hope of reparation, how far a loose, ill-considered and ignorant remark will float on the tongues of the idle, how much unmerited misery is oftentimes entailed by such unweighed assertions and opinions, and how small is the return of benefit in any form whatever, it would almost appear a necessary moral consequence that the world, by general consent, would determine to eradicate so pernicious an evil, in the common interest of mankind. ”

“ Why should not a young woman who lived in a house so much apart from a general neighbourhood, not pass most of her time in the company of those with whom she dwelt? “If they were good enough to live with, I should think they might be good enough to associate with,” whispered one of the most active female talkers of Biberry, but in a tone so loud as to be heard by all near her. ”

“ I would not part with it for all the honours that riches and rank can bestow.”
“How strange that you, of all women, my dear mamma,” said Anna, kissing her cheek, “should be accused of crimes so horrible to obtain a little money; for this poor Mrs. Goodwin could have had no great sum after all, and you are so rich!”
“More is the pity that I have not made a better use of my money. You are to be envied, girls, in having the fortunes of gentlewomen, and in having no more. I do believe it is better for our sex barely to be independent in their respective stations, and not to be rendered rich. ”

“ We are far from saying that any rumour expressed in the terms we have used, was circulating in Mrs. Horton’s bar-room; but one that contained all their essentials was. It is one of the curious effects of the upward tendency of truth that almost every effort to conceal it altogether fails; and this at the very time when idle and heartless gossip is filling the world with lies. The tongue does a thousand times more evil than the sword; destroys more happiness, inflicts more incurable wounds, leaves deeper 319and more indelible scars. Truth is rarely met with unalloyed by falsehood. ”

“ Anna, my love, Jack is a lucky fellow—far luckier than he deserves to be. You carry the right sentiment into wedlock. It is the right of the husband to be the head of his family; and the wife who resists his authority is neither prudent nor a Christian. He may abuse it, it is true; but, even then, so long as criminality is escaped, it were better to submit. I approve of every word you have uttered, dear, and thank you for it all in my nephew’s name. ”

“ On such occasions Anna was always so truthful, so gentle, so earnest, so natural, and so sweetly feminine, that John must have been made of stone, to remain insensible of her excellent qualities. If women did but know how much their power, not to say charms, are increased by gentleness, by tenderness in lieu of coldness of manner, by keeping within the natural circle of their sex’s feelings, instead of aping an independence and spirit more suited to men than to their own condition, we should see less of discord in domestic life, happier wives, better mothers, and more reasonable mistresses. ”

“ The witness now appeared to be bothered. He looked around him, and meeting everywhere with countenances which evidently reflected ‘yes,’ he had not the moral courage to run counter to public opinion, and say ‘no.’ It is amazing what a tyrant this concentration of minds gets to be over those who are not very clear-headed themselves, and who are not constituted, morally, to resist its influence. It almost possesses a power to persuade these persons not to put faith in their own senses, and disposes them to believe what they hear, rather than what they have seen. ”

“ It’s a pity that so handsome and so agreeable a young lady should be hanged, Mr. Dunscomb!”
“Timms, you are as shrewd a fellow, in your own way, as I know. Your law does not amount to any great matter, nor do you take hold of the strong points of a case very often; but you perform wonders with the weaker. In the way of an opinion on facts, I know few men more to be relied on. Tell me, then, frankly, what do you think of the guilt or innocence of Mary Monson?” ”

“ In the first place, there is no compromise about it; one side or the other gains the victory; and as success is sustained by numbers, the conquerors push their advantages to the utmost. They think of their own grosser interests, their passions and prejudices, rather than of any ‘healthful compromise,’ as you term it. What compromise is there in this infernal code?”—Dunscomb was an ultra himself, in opposition to a system that has a good deal of that which is useful, diluted by more that is not quite so good—“or what in this matter of the election of judges by the people? ”

“ Even religion is emancipated! There are churches, it is true; but they exist as appendages of society, instead of being divine institutions, established for the secret purposes of unerring wisdom; and we hear men openly commending this or that ecclesiastical organization, because it has more or less of the savour of republicanism. But one new dogma remains to be advanced—that the government of the universe is democratical—in which the ‘music of the spheres’ is a popular song; and the disappearance of a world a matter to be referred to the people in their primary capacity. ”

“ It is not easy to tell how we acquire those in-and-in habits, which get to be a sort of second nature, and almost bestow on us new instincts. It is by these secret sympathies, these tastes that pervade the moral, as the nerves form a natural telegraph through the physical, system, that one feels rather than sees, when he is in the company of persons in his own class in life. ”