of Goodridge rivalled, in mental torture, every thing martyrologists tell us of the physical agony endured by the victim of the inquisitor, when roasted before slow fires or stretched upon the rack.  Still it seemed impossible to assign any motive for the self-robbery and the self-maiming of Goodridge, which any judge or jury would accept as reasonable.  The real motive has never been discovered.  Webster argued that the motive might have originated in a desire to escape from the payment of his debts, or in a whimsical ambition to have his name sounded all over Maine and Massachusetts as the heroic tradesman who had parted with his money only when overpowered by superior force.  It is impossible to say what motives may impel men who are half-crazed by vanity, or half-demonized by malice.  Coleridge describes Iago’s hatred of Othello as the hatred which a base nature instinctively feels for a noble one, and his assignment of motives for his acts as the mere “motive-hunting of a motiveless malignity.”

Whatever may have been Goodridge’s motive in his attempt to ruin the innocent men he falsely accused, it is certain that Webster saved these men from the unjust punishment of an imputed crime.  Only the skeleton of his argument before the jury has been preserved; but what we have of it evidently passed under his revision.  He knew that the plot of Goodridge had been so cunningly contrived, that every man of the twelve before him, whose verdict was to determine the fate of his clients, was inwardly persuaded of their guilt.  Some small marked portions of the money which Goodridge swore he had on his person on the night of the pretended robbery were found in their house.  Circumstantial evidence brought their guilt with a seemingly irresistible force literally “home” to them.  It was the conviction of the leaders of the Essex bar that no respectable lawyer could appear in their defence without becoming, in some degree, their accomplice.  But Webster, after damaging the character of the prosecutor by his stern cross-examination, addressed the jury, not as an advocate bearing down upon them with his arguments and appeals, but rather as a thirteenth juryman, who had cosily introduced himself into their company, and was arguing the case with them after they had retired for consultation among themselves.  The simplicity of the language employed is not more notable than the power evinced in seizing the main points on which the question of guilt or innocence turned.  At every quiet but deadly stab aimed at the theory of the prosecution, he is careful to remark, that “it is for the jury to say under their oaths” whether such inconsistencies or improbabilities should have any effect on their minds.  Every strong argument closes with the ever-recurring phrase, “It is for the jury to say”; and, at the end, the jury, thoroughly convinced, said, “Not guilty.”  The Kennistons were vindicated; and the public, which had been almost unanimous in declaring them fit tenants for the State prison, soon blamed the infatuation which had made them the accomplices of a villain in hunting down two unoffending citizens, and of denouncing every lawyer who should undertake their defence as a legal rogue.