The statement of the prosecution, said Dan Anderson, was on the whole a fair one, and no discredit to the learned brother making it.  None would more readily than himself yield acquiescence to the statement that law and order must prevail.  Without law there could be nothing but anarchy.  Under anarchy progress was at an end.  The individual must give up something of his rights to the state and the community.  He gave up a certain amount of liberty, but received therefor an equivalent in protection.  The law was, therefore, no oppressor, no monster, no usurer, no austere being, reaping where it had not sown.  The law was nothing to be dreaded, nothing to be feared; and, upon the other hand, it was nothing to be scorned.

There must be a beginning, continued Dan Anderson.  There must be something established.  The pound measure was one pound, the same all over the country; a yard measure was a yard, and there was no guesswork about it.  It was the same.  It was a unit.  So with the law.  It must be the same, a unit, soulless, unfeeling, just, unchangeable.  There was nothing indeterminate in it.  The attitude of the law was thus or so, and not otherwise.  It was not for the individual to pass upon any of these questions.  It was for the courts to do so, the approved machinery set aside, under the social compact, for reducing the friction of the wheels of society, for securing the permanency of things beneficial to that society, and for removing things injurious thereto.  The Law itself was immutable.  The courts must administer that Law without malice, without feeling, impersonally, justly.

In so far as there had hitherto been no Law in Heart’s Desire, went on the speaker, thus far had our citizens dwelt in barbarism, had indeed been unfit, under the very definition of things, to bear the proud title of citizens of America, the justest, the most order-loving, as well as the bravest and the most aggressive nation of the world.  The time had now come for the establishment in this community of the Law, that beneficent agency of progress, that indispensable factor, that inseparable attendant upon civilization.  Upon the sky should blaze no more the red riot of anarchy and barbarism.  Upon the summit of the noble mountain overtopping this happy valley there should sit no more the grinning figure of malevolent and unrestrained vice, but the pure form of the blind Goddess of Justice, holding ever aloft over this happy land the unfaltering sword and the unwavering scales, so that all might look thereon, the rightdoers in smiling security, the wrong-doing in terror of their deeds.  This was the Law!

“And now, gentlemen of this jury,” said Dan Anderson, “I stand here before you to make no excuses for this Law, to palliate nothing in the way of its workings, to set no tentative or temporizing date for the time of the arrival at this place of the image of the Law.  I say to you here to-day, at this hour, that image now sits there enthroned above us.  The Law is not to come—­it has come, it is here!”