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Danny Lowry had lived for years in fear of the blow which had so suddenly struck him down, for there had never been any blinking of the obvious fact that in acting as an unlicensed veterinary he was brazenly violating the law.  On the other hand, not being able to read or write, and having no technical knowledge of medicine, all his experience, all his skill, all his love of animals could avail him nothing so far as securing a license was concerned.  He could not read an examination paper, but he could interpret the symptoms seen in a trembling neck and a lack-luster eye.  Danny had no choice but to break the law or abandon the only career for which he had an aptitude, or by which he could hope to earn a living at his age.  His crime was malum prohibitum, not malum in se, but it was, nevertheless, a violation of a most necessary law.  Certainly none of us wish to be doctored by tyros or humbugs, or to have our animals treated by them.  Only Danny was neither a tyro nor a humbug, and had he not been a lawbreaker the world would have been to some extent the loser.

Yet by all the canons of ethics and justice it was most improper for Mr. Tutt to hurry off to the Tombs and bail out old Danny Lowry, a self-confessed lawbreaker, giving his own bond and the house on Twenty-third Street as security.  Still more so, as more unblushingly ostentatious, was his taking the criminal over to Pont’s and giving him the very best dinner that Signor Faccini, proprietor of that celebrated hostelry, could purvey.

Hard cases are said to make bad law; I wonder if they make bad people.  If “conscience makes cowards of us all” does human sympathy play ducks and drakes with conscience?  Does it blind the eye of reason?  Rather, does it not illumine and expose the fallacies of logic and the falsities of the syllogism?  Do two and two make four in human polity as in mathematics?  Sometimes it would not seem so.

Certainly you would have picked Mr. Bently Gibson, of The Gibson Woolen Mills, as a model juror.  One look at him as a prospective talesman in a murder case and you would have unhesitatingly murmured, “The defense challenges peremptorily!” His broad forehead, large well-shaped nose, firm chin and clear calm eye evidenced his common sense, his conscientiousness and his uncompromising adherence to principle.  His customs declarations were complete to the smallest item, his income-tax returns models of self-sacrifice, he was patriotic and civic, he belonged to the Welfare League and the Citizens’ Union, and—­I hesitate to confess it—­he subscribed to the annual deficit of the Society for the Suppression of Sin.  On the face of it, he was the kind of man the district attorney tries to select as foreman of a jury when he has to prosecute a woman who had kidnaped her own child out of a foundling asylum.