"
Colonel Stogart smiled scornfully at the platitude, and sat down with
an expressive shrug; but no one noticed him.
The District Attorney raised his arm and faced the court-room. "It
cannot be said of _us_," he cried, "that we have sat idle in the
market-place. We have advanced and advanced in the last ten years,
until we have reached the very foremost place with civilized people.
This Rip Van Winkle of the past returns to find a city where he left a
prairie town, a bank where he spun his roulette wheel, this
magnificent court-house instead of a vigilance committee. And what is
his part in this new court-house, which to-day, for the first time,
throws open its doors to protect the just and to punish the unjust?
"Is he there in the box among those honorable men, the gentlemen of
the jury? Is he in that great crowd of intelligent, public-spirited
citizens who make the bone and sinew of this our fair city? Is he on
the honored bench dispensing justice, and making the intricacies of
the law straight? No, gentlemen; he has no part in our triumph. He is
there, in the prisoners' pen, an outlaw, a convicted murderer, and an
unconvicted assassin, the last of his race--the bullies and bad men of
the border--a thing to be forgotten and put away forever from the
sight of man. He has outlasted his time; he is a superfluity and an
outrage on our reign of decency and order. And I ask you, gentlemen,
to put him away where he will not hear the voice of man nor children's
laughter, nor see a woman smile, where he will not even see the face
of the warden who feeds him, nor sunlight except as it is filtered
through the iron bars of a jail.
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