The truth is that only a very small
portion of the stuff contained in the various "statements" can,
under the rules of evidence, be laid before the jury--not, we
venture to assert, more than would fill half a newspaper column in
all. What _will_ be laid before the jury is, in the main, "questions
of veracity" between three or four persons whose credit is already
greatly shaken, or, in other words, the very kind of questions on
which juries are most likely to disagree, even when the jurymen are
entirely unprejudiced. In the present case they are sure to be
prejudiced, and are sure to be governed, consciously or
unconsciously, in reaching their conclusions by agencies wholly
foreign to the matter in hand, and are thus very likely to disagree.
There are very few men whose opinions about Mr. Beecher's guilt or
innocence are not influenced by their own religious and political
beliefs, or by their social antecedents or surroundings. A curious
and somewhat instructive illustration of the way in which a man's
fate in such cases as this may be affected by considerations having
no sort of relation to the facts, is afforded by the attitude of the
Western press toward the chief actors in the present scandal.
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