Money-getting and cotton-spinning have left us little time for fun of
any kind in England--no one has a moment to spare, let him be ever so
droll, and a joke seems now to be esteemed a _bona fide_ expenditure;
and as “a pin a day” is said to be “a groat a year,” there is no
calculating what an inroad any manner of pleasantry might not make into
a man's income. Book-writers have ceased to be laughter-moving--the
stage has given it up altogether, except now and then in a new
tragedy--society prefers gravity to gaiety--and, in fact, the spirit of
comic fun and drollery would seem to have died out in the land--if it
were not for that inimitable institution called trial by jury. Bless
their honest hearts! jurymen do indeed relieve the drab-coloured look of
every-day life--they come out in strong colour from the sombre tints of
common-place events and people. Queer dogs! nothing can damp the warm
ardour of their comic vein--all the solemnity of a court of justice--the
look of the bar and the bench--the voice of the crier--the blue bags
of briefs--the “terrible show,” has no effect on their minds--“ruat
coelum,” they will have their joke.
It is in vain for the judge, let him be ever so rigid in his charge,
to tell them that their province is simply with certain facts, on which
they have to pronounce an opinion of yea or nay. They must be jurymen,
and “something more.” It's not every day Mr. Sniggins, of Pimlico, is
called upon to keep company with a chief-justice and sergeant learned in
the law--Popkins don't leave his shop once a week to discuss Coke upon
Littleton with an attorney-general. No: the event to them is a great
one--there they sit, fawned on, and flattered by counsel on both
sides--called impartial and intelligent, and all that--and while every
impertinence the law encourages has been bandied about the body of the
court, _they_ remain to be lauded and praised by all parties, for they
have a verdict in their power, and when it comes--what a thing it is!
There is a well-known story of an English nobleman, desiring to remain
_incog_. in Calais, telling his negro servant--“If any one ask who I am,
Sambo, mind you say, 'a Frenchman.'” Sambo carried out the instruction
by saying--“My massa a Frenchman, and so am I.” This anecdote exactly
exemplifies a verdict of a jury--it cannot stop short at sense, but
must, by one fatal plunge, involve its decision in absurdity.
Hear what lately happened in the north of Ireland. A man was tried
and found guilty of murder--the case admitted no doubt--the act was a
cold-blooded, deliberate assassination, committed by a soldier on his
sergeant, in the presence of many witnesses. The trial proceeded; the
facts were proved; and--I quote the local newspaper--
“The jury retired, and were shut up when the judge left the court,
at half-past seven. At nine, his lordship returned to court, when the
foreman of the jury intimated that they had agreed. They were then
called into court, and having answered to their names, returned a
verdict of guilty, but recommended the prisoner to mercy upon account of
the close intimacy that existed between the parties at the time of the
occurrence.”
Now, what ever equalled this? When the jury who tried Madame Laffarge
for the murder of her husband, returned a verdict of guilty, with that
recommendation to mercy which is implied by the words “des circumstances
atténuantes,” Alphonse Karr pronounced the “extenuating circumstances,”
to be the fact, that she always mixed gum with the arsenic, and never
gave him his poison “neat.”
But even _they_ never thought of carrying out their humanity farther by
employing the Belfast plea, that she had been “intimate with him” before
she killed him. No, it was reserved for our canny northerns to find out
this new secret of criminal jurisprudence, and to show the world
that there is a deep philosophy in the vulgar expression, a blood
relation--meaning thereby that degree of allianceship which admits of
butchery, and makes killing no murder; for if intimacy be a ground of
mercy, what must be friendship, what brotherhood, or paternity?
Were this plea to become general, how cautious would men become about
their acquaintances--what a dread they would entertain of becoming
intimate with gentlemen from Tipperary!
I scarcely think the Whigs would throw out such lures for Dan and
his followers, if they could consider these consequences; and I doubt
much--taking everything into consideration, that the “Duke” would see so
much of Lord Brougham as he has latterly.
“Whom can a man make free with, if not with his friends?” saith Figaro;
and the Belfast men have studied Beaumarchais, and only “carried out his
principle,” as the Whigs say, when they speak of establishing popery in
Ireland, to complete the intention of emancipation.
Lawyers must have been prodigiously sick of all the usual arguments
in defence of prisoners in criminal cases many a year ago. One of the
cleverest lawyers and the cleverest men I ever knew, says he would hang
any man who was defended on an _alibi_, and backed by a good character.
Insanity is worn out; but here comes Belfast to the rescue, with
its plea of intimacy. Show that your client was no common
acquaintance--prove clearly habits of meeting and dining
together--display a degree of friendship between the parties that
bordered on brotherhood, and all is safe. Let your witness satisfy the
jury that they never had an altercation or angry word in their
lives, and depend upon it, killing will seem merely a little freak of
eccentricity, that may be indulged with Norfolk Island, but not punished
with the gallows.
“Guilty, my lord, but very intimate with the deceased,” is a new
discovery in law, and will hereafter be known as “the Belfast verdict.”