Field, “while overruling a demurrer, assails this contract, in effect pronouncing it a forgery.”  This statement is totally unfounded.  From it the casual reader would suppose that the demurrer was to the complaint in the original case, and that the court was forestalling evidence, whereas it was a demurrer in a proceeding to revive the suit, which had abated by the death of the party, and to give effect to the decree already rendered therein, after a full hearing of the testimony.

Mr. Montgomery said: 

“The opinion also charges Mrs. Terry with perjury, after she has sworn that it was genuine.”

The judgment of a court may be referred to by one of its judges, even though the rendering of the judgment convicted a party or a witness, of perjury, without furnishing the perjurer with a justification for denouncing the judge.  Mr. Montgomery furthermore said that the “opinion charged her not only with forgery and perjury, but with unchastity as well; for if she had not been Sharon’s wife, she had unquestionably been his kept mistress.”  He says: 

“At the announcement of this decision from the bench in the presence of a crowded court-room; a decision which she well knew, before the going down of another sun, would be telegraphed to the remotest corners of the civilized world, to be printed and reprinted with sensational head-lines in every newspaper, and talked over by every scandal-monger on the face of the earth; was it any wonder—­not that it was right—­but was it any wonder that this high-spirited, educated woman, sprung from as respectable a family as any in the great State of Missouri, proud of her ancestry, and prizing her good name above everything on this earth, when she heard herself thus adjudged in one breath to be guilty of forgery, perjury, and unchastity, and thus degraded from the exalted position of wife—­to which the Supreme Court of her State had said she was entitled—­down to that of a paid harlot; was it any wonder, I say, that like an enraged tigress she sprang to her feet, and in words of indignation sought to defend her wounded honor?”

Mr. Montgomery did not speak truly when he said that on this occasion such a decision was announced from the bench.  The decision was announced on the 24th of December, 1885, nearly three years before.  The only decision announced on this occasion was that the case did not die with the plaintiff therein—­William Sharon—­but that the executor of his estate had the right to act—­had a right to be substituted for the deceased, and to have the decree executed just as it would have been if Mr. Sharon had lived.  It was amazing effrontery and disregard of the truth on the part of Mr. Montgomery to make such a statement as he did to the Supreme Court, when the record, lying open before them, virtually contradicted what he was saying.