On this subject the Kent Leader had some interesting remarks on the anarchists as well as their Judge.

“Speaking of dynamite,” it said, “we have serious cause for alarm in our free land.  The wretches concerned in the abominable outrage of Tuesday last cannot be too severely dealt with.  It is evident that their intent was against Justice Hawkins, and the fact that Sir Henry was the presiding Judge at the recent anarchists’ trial points the connection between the outrage and other anarchists....

“Justice Hawkins has been spoken of as a harsh Judge.  Ever since the ‘Penge mystery’ trial many have termed him the hanging Judge.  We have sat under him on many eventful occasions, and venture the opinion that no one who has had equal opportunity would come to any other conclusion than that he was painstaking and careful to a degree, and particularly in criminal cases formed one of the most conscientious Judges on the Bench.  Hanging Judge!  Why, we have seen the tears start to his eyes when sentencing a prisoner to death, and, owing to emotion, only by a masterful effort could his voice be heard.  Above all, he is a just Judge.”

[Many persons were not aware, and thousands are not at the present time, that when a verdict of “Wilful murder” is pronounced a Judge has no alternative but to read the prescribed sentence of death.  If this were not so, the situation would be almost intolerable, for who would not avoid, if possible, deciding that the irrevocable doom of the prisoner should be delivered?  In many cases the feelings of the Judges would interfere with the course of justice, and murderers would receive more sympathy than their victims, while fiends would escape to the danger of society.

And yet that Judges have sympathy, and that it can be, and is, in these days properly exercised, the following story will testify.  I give the story as Lord Brampton told it.]

In a circuit town a poor woman was tried before me for murdering her baby.  The facts were so simple that they can be told in a few words.  Her baby was a week old, and the poor woman, unable to sustain the load of shame which oppressed her, ran one night into a river, holding the baby in her arms.  She had got into the water deep enough to drown the baby, while her own life was saved by a boatman.

The scene was sad enough as she stood under a lamp and looked into the face of the policeman, clutching her dead child to her breast, and refusing to part with it.

At the trial there was no defence to the charge of wilful murder except one, and that I felt it my duty to discountenance.  I think the depositions were handed to a young barrister by my order, and that being so, I exercised my discretion as to the mode of defence.  In other words, I defended the prisoner myself.

In order to avoid the sentence that would have followed an acquittal on the ground of insanity, which would have entailed perhaps lifelong imprisonment, I took upon myself to depart from the usual course, and ask the jury whether, without being insane in the ordinary sense, the woman might not have been at the time of committing the deed in so excited a state as not to know what she was doing.