We gave him the right of appeal on all matters of law through all the courts of our States, and even into the courts of the United States, while we allowed the People no right of appeal at all.  If the prisoner was convicted he could go on and test the case all along the line,—­if he was acquitted the People had to rest satisfied.  We stopped the mouth of the judge and made it illegal for him to “sum up” the case or discuss the facts to any extent.  We clipped the wings of the prosecutor and allowed him less latitude of expression than an English judge.  Then we gazed on the work of our intellects and said it was good.  If an ignorant jury acquitted a murderer under the eyes of a gagged and helpless judge, we said that it was all right and that it was better that ninety-nine guilty men should escape than that one innocent man should be convicted.  Yes, better for whom?  If another murderer, about whose guilt the highest court in one of the States said there was no possible doubt, secured three new trials and was finally acquitted on the fourth, it merely demonstrated how perfectly we safeguarded the rights of the individual.

The result is that we have unnecessarily fettered ourselves, have furnished a multitude of technical avenues of escape to wrong-doers, and have created a popular contempt for courts of justice, which shows itself in the sentimental and careless verdicts of juries, in a lack of public spirit, and in an indisposition to prosecute wrong-doers.  In addition, the impression sought to be conveyed by the yellow press that our judiciary is corrupt and that money can buy anything—­even justice—­leads the jury in many cases to feel that their presence is merely a formal concession to an archaic procedure and that their oaths have no real significance.

The community, the “People,” have a sufficiently hard task to secure justice at any criminal trial.  On the one hand is the abstract proposition that the law has been violated, on the other sits a human being, ofttimes contrite, always an object of pity.  He is presumed innocent, he is to be given the benefit of every reasonable doubt.  He has the right to make his own powerful appeal to the jury and to have the services of the best lawyer he can secure to sway their emotions and their sympathies.  If the prosecutor resorts to eloquence he is stigmatized as “over-zealous” and as a “persecutor.”  If a plainly guilty defendant be acquitted, not the trampled ideal of justice, but the vision of a liberated prisoner rejoicing in his freedom hovers in the talesman’s dreams.

So far so good; we can afford to stand by a system which in the long run has served us fairly well.  But an occasional evil, an evil which when it occurs is productive of great harm and serves to give color to the popular opinion of criminal law, begins only when the lawyers have had their opportunity for elocution.  At the conclusion of the charge the defendant’s attorney proceeds to put the judge through what is