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An English judge of the last century, celebrated for his uprightness, used to balance against that pity so much vaunted for the criminal, the duty of 'a pity to the country. But private prosecutors of their own servants, often feel both modes of pity at the same moment.
Out of that has grown the further statement which courts and prosecutors have used to excuse themselves for the cruelty of enforcing a law that does violence to the feelings of the people. This statement is to the effect that so long as the law is on the books, it is the duty of officers to enforce it.
The subsequent legislation by which prosecutors were recompensed for loss of time and money, when prosecuting the 'wolves in society, may be added to the measures forseen if not actually promoted by Fielding's enlightened zeal. And in nothing was he more in advance of his age than in his denunciation of that scandal of the eighteenth century, the conduct and frequency of public executions.
To the eager, the warm-hearted, the spiritually minded and staunch members of these Latin American Bahá’í communities who, among the followers of Bahá’u’lláh, already constitute the most considerable body of recruits from the ranks of the most deeply entrenched and powerful Church of Christendom; whose motherlands have been chosen as the scene of the earliest victories won by the prosecutors of ‘Abdu’l-Bahá’s Divine Plan; launched on their crusade for the spiritual conquest of the whole planet; the establishment of whose projected national spiritual assemblies must constitute a notable landmark in the second epoch of the Formative Age of the Bahá’í Dispensation; whose leading spiritual assemblies are now establishing direct contact with the World Center of the Faith of Bahá’u’lláh in the Holy Land; the photographs of whose elected representatives, at their chief centers, will soon adorn the walls of His Mansion at Bahjí; a few of whose members have already arisen to carry back the torch of divine guidance entrusted to their care to the peoples and races from which they have sprung—to this privileged, this youngest, this dynamic and highly promising member of the organic Bahá’í World Community, I feel moved, before I dismiss this aspect of my theme, to direct this general appeal to rise to the heights of the glorious opportunity which destiny is unfolding before its members.
Never at a loss, he condescended to a cringing hypocrisy: he whined, he whimpered, he babbled of reform, he plied his prosecutors with letters so packed with penitence, that they abandoned their case, and in a couple of days Simms had eased a collector at Eversey Bank of three hundred pounds.
And oh! how glad he is to tell her all he had forgotten in that last hurried interview, and to fall on his knees before her and fervently beseech her pardon for all the unkindness and cruelty that wasted her form and broke her heart! The scene suddenly changes. He is on his trial again: there are the judge and jury, and prosecutors, and witnesses, just as they were before.
"If that young man," continued the lieutenant, Guevara, in a loud and severe tone, "had been more cautious, if he had confided less in certain persons with whom he corresponded, if our prosecutors did not know how to interpret so subtly what is written, that young man would surely have been acquitted."
No doubt he had evinced this, for Chaffanbrass had understood what was going on in his colleague's mind, and had looked round at him from time to time with an air of scorn that had been almost unendurable. And then it had become the duty of the prosecutors to prove the circumstances of the former trial.
If he said an incendiary thing one moment he qualified it the next; he justified violence only to deprecate it; and months later, when on trial for his life and certain remarks were quoted against him, he confounded his prosecutors by demanding the contexts.
This is a political trial, and in this country political trials are always conducted in this way. It is considered by the crown prosecutors to be their duty to exclude from the jury-box every juror known, or suspected, to hold or agree with the accused in political sentiment.
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