Plays : Second Series eBook

This eBook from the Gutenberg Project consists of approximately 184 pages of information about Plays .

Plays : Second Series eBook

This eBook from the Gutenberg Project consists of approximately 184 pages of information about Plays .

The judge.  William Falder, you have been given fair trial and found guilty, in my opinion rightly found guilty, of forgery. [He pauses; then, consulting his notes, goes on] The defence was set up that you were not responsible for your actions at the moment of committing this crime.  There is no, doubt, I think, that this was a device to bring out at first hand the nature of the temptation to which you succumbed.  For throughout the trial your counsel was in reality making an appeal for mercy.  The setting up of this defence of course enabled him to put in some evidence that might weigh in that direction.  Whether he was well advised to so is another matter.  He claimed that you should be treated rather as a patient than as a criminal.  And this plea of his, which in the end amounted to a passionate appeal, he based in effect on an indictment of the march of Justice, which he practically accused of confirming and completing the process of criminality.  Now, in considering how far I should allow weight to his appeal; I have a number of factors to take into account.  I have to consider on the one hand the grave nature of your offence, the deliberate way in which you subsequently altered the counterfoil, the danger you caused to an innocent man—­and that, to my mind, is a very grave point—­and finally I have to consider the necessity of deterring others from following your example.  On the other hand, I have to bear in mind that you are young, that you have hitherto borne a good character, that you were, if I am to believe your evidence and that of your witnesses, in a state of some emotional excitement when you committed this crime.  I have every wish, consistently with my duty—­not only to you, but to the community—­to treat you with leniency.  And this brings me to what are the determining factors in my mind in my consideration of your case.  You are a clerk in a lawyer’s office—­that is a very serious element in this case; there can be no possible excuse made for you on the ground that you were not fully conversant with the nature of the crime you were committing, and the penalties that attach to it.  It is said, however, that you were carried away by your emotions.  The story has been told here to-day of your relations with this—­er—­Mrs. Honeywill; on that story both the defence and the plea for mercy were in effect based.  Now what is that story?  It is that you, a young man, and she, a young woman, unhappily married, had formed an attachment, which you both say—­with what truth I am unable to gauge —­had not yet resulted in immoral relations, but which you both admit was about to result in such relationship.  Your counsel has made an attempt to palliate this, on the ground that the woman is in what he describes, I think, as “a hopeless position.”  As to that I can express no opinion.  She is a married woman, and the fact is patent that you committed this crime with the view of furthering an immoral design.  Now, however

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Plays : Second Series from Project Gutenberg. Public domain.