The next morning
the public caught light like tinder; and the prisoner was tried
over again, before an amateur court of justice, in the columns
of the newspapers. All the people who had no personal experience
whatever on the subject seized their pens, and rushed (by kind
permission of the editor) into print. Doctors who had _not_
attended the sick man, and who had _not_ been present at the
examination of the body, declared by dozens that he had died
a natural death. Barristers without business, who had _not_ heard
the evidence, attacked the jury who had heard it, and judged the
judge, who had sat on the bench before some of them were born.
The general public followed the lead of the barristers and the
doctors, and the young buccaneers who had set the thing going.
Here was the law that they all paid to protect them actually
doing its duty in dreadful earnest! Shocking! shocking! The
British Public rose to protest as one man against the working
of its own machinery; and the Home Secretary, in a state of
distraction, went to the judge. The judge held firm. He had
said it was the right verdict at the time, and he said so still.
'But suppose,' says the Home Secretary, 'that the prosecution
had tried some other way of proving her guilty at the trial
than the way they did try, what would you and the jury have done
then?' Of course it was quite impossible for the judge to say.
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