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When the jury came, the judge was called, Hogarth stood up, and the clerk of arraigns put a question to the foreman. The foreman said: "We find the prisoner guilty: but beg to recommend him to the mercy of the Crown". "On what grounds?" asked his lordship. "On the grounds of past good conduct and strong provocation".
This proclamation was followed by a profound silence, and after a brief interval the Clerk of Arraigns turned towards the jury and addressed them collectively "Gentlemen of the jury, the prisoner at the bar stands indicted by the name of Reuben Hornby, for that he, on the ninth or tenth of March, feloniously did steal, take and carry away a parcel of diamonds of the goods of John Hornby.
After a little murmur of functionaries, the Clerk of Arraigns turned to the prisoner, and said, in a loud voice, "Catharine Gaunt, hold up thy hand."
The humble Christian, who has been a model to others, calls himself a worm of the dust on one page of his diary, and arraigns himself on the next for coming short of the perfection of an archangel. Conscience itself requires a conscience, or nothing can be more unscrupulous. It told Saul that he did well in persecuting the Christians.
"Pris'ner at the bar," said the Clerk of Arraigns, "have ye anything to say why this court should not pass sentence o' death?" She held tight of the rail before her, and spoke out loud and clear "My Lord and gentlemen all, I be a guilty woman; an' I be ready to die at once for my sin. But if ye kill me now, ye kill the child in my body an' he is innocent."
The sense, then, of sin is in a certain degree an artificial sense, and would seem to consist partly of a deep and divine instinct which arraigns the soul for acts, which may be in themselves trifling, but which seem to possess the sinful quality; and partly of a conventional instinct which considers certain things to be abominable, which are not necessarily in themselves sinful, because it is the custom of the world to consider them so.
Land in the Northern States averages $28.07 an acre in value, and in the Southern States it is $5.34. The difference measures the robbery committed on a community of 10,000,000 by the 350,000 slave-holders. These "chevaliers of the lash" he arraigns with a rhetoric compared to which Sumner's and Phillip's words were pale.
At times, I say, it is thus with them, especially when they are under warm convictions that the day of judgment is at hand, or when they feel in themselves as if death was coming as a tempest, to steal them away from their enjoyments, and lusts, and delights; then the bed shakes on which they lie, then the proud tongue doth falter in their mouth, and their knees knock one against another; then their conscience stares, and roars, and tears, and arraigns them before God's judgment-seat, or threatens to follow them down to hell, and there to wreck its fury on them, for all the abuses and affronts this wicked wretch offered to it in the day in which it controlled his unlawful deeds.
Let us now permit, the native press to speak again on the subject engaging our attention. Thus Vanguardia a bitter anti-American sheet, arraigns its wealthy fellow-countrymen for lack of initiative and fondness of routine.
Hannibal arraigns the narrow policy of his country as his true vanquisher. These and the like are as effectual means of inculcating a general truth as a set discussion. To these numerous and perhaps more striking passages bearing on the internal history might be added. But a historian should have his whole subject under command. It is not enough to illuminate it by flashes.
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