Secretary of State is invested with the privilege of what is called mercy.  It is justice rather that is wanted.  If Bagwax were in the right about that envelope,—­and the reader will by this time think that he was right; and if Dick Shand had sworn truly, then certainly our friend John Caldigate was not in want of mercy.  It was instant justice that he required,—­with such compensation as might come to him from the indignant sympathy of all good men.

I remember to have seen a man at Bermuda whose fate was peculiar.  He was sleek, fat, and apparently comfortable, mixing pills when I saw him, he himself a convict and administering to the wants of his brother convicts.  He remonstrated with me on the hardness of his position.  ‘Either I did do it, or I didn’t,’ he said.  ’It was because they thought I didn’t that they sent me here.  And if I didn’t, what right had they to keep me here at all?’ I passed on in silence, not daring to argue the matter with the man in face of the warder.  But the man was right.  He had murdered his wife;—­so at least the jury had said,—­and had been sentenced to be hanged.  He had taken the poor woman into a little island, and while she was bathing had drowned her.  Her screams had been heard on the mainland, and the jury had found the evidence sufficient.  Some newspaper had thought the reverse, and had mooted the question;—­was not the distance too great for such screams to have been heard, or, at any rate, understood?  So the man was again brought to trial in the Court of the Home Office, and was,—­not pardoned, but sent to grow fat and make pills at Bermuda.  He had, or he had not, murdered his wife.  If he did the deed he should have been hanged;—­and if not, he should not have been forced to make extorted pills.

What was a Secretary of State to do in such a case?  No doubt he believed that the wretch had murdered his wife.  No doubt the judge believed it.  All the world believed it.  But the newspaper was probably right in saying that the evidence was hardly conclusive,—­probably right because it produced its desired effect.  If the argument had been successfully used with the jury, the jury would have acquitted the man.  Then surely the Secretary of State should have sent him out as though acquitted; and, not daring to hang him, should have treated him as innocent.  Another trial was, in truth, demanded.

And so it was in Caldigate’s case.  The Secretary of State, getting up early in the morning after a remarkable speech, in which he vindicated his Ministry from the attacks of all Europe, did read all the papers, and took home to himself the great Bagwaxian theory.  He mastered Dick’s evidence;—­and managed to master something also as to Dick’s character.  He quite understood the argument as to the postage-stamps,—­which went further with him than the other arguments.  And he understood the perplexity of his own position.  If Bagwax was right, not a moment should be lost in releasing