This universal unsuspecting confidence was imparted by
sympathy to myself, in spite of all my training in opinions so widely
different. So it is with most of us: that which we observe to be taken
as a matter of course by those around us, we take as a matter of course
ourselves. And after all, it is our duty to do this, save upon grave
occasion.
But when I was alone, and began to think the trial over, it certainly did
strike me as betraying a strange and untenable position. Had the judge
said that he acknowledged the probable truth, namely, that the prisoner
was born of unhealthy parents, or had been starved in infancy, or had met
with some accidents which had developed consumption; and had he then gone
on to say that though he knew all this, and bitterly regretted that the
protection of society obliged him to inflict additional pain on one who
had suffered so much already, yet that there was no help for it, I could
have understood the position, however mistaken I might have thought it.
The judge was fully persuaded that the infliction of pain upon the weak
and sickly was the only means of preventing weakness and sickliness from
spreading, and that ten times the suffering now inflicted upon the
accused was eventually warded off from others by the present apparent
severity.
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