Usually it is easier not to exercise than to exercise
discretion, and the result is that the right of cross-examination is
usually unchecked, and in most important cases which are widely
reported the right is pushed to lengths which, with witnesses of any
sensibility, amount to a process of slow torture. If the right is
abused in England, it is unquestionably abused here, and probably at
the time of the Beecher trial we should have had complaints about it
but for the fact that in the singular society in which the parties
to that case lives, a craving for notoriety had been developed which
made any discussion of their private affairs less disagreeable than
it is to most people. But with the great majority of mankind there
is nothing more odious than the extraction, by a sharp, hostile
lawyer, from their own unwilling lips, of the details of their moral
history. There is probably no one in existence, however good, and
however quiet his conscience may be, who can endure without a
shudder the thought of every transaction of his past life being
dragged out in a court of justice for the amusement of a gaping
crowd.
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