I replied, “I will not torture your minds with a long judgment, though the issues which you have raised invite it. I will tell you at once that the first two pleas fail. The sentence was not fair, and on hearing the evidence you should rather have addressed your minds to the inequity of the social conditions which it revealed, and to exhort the prosecutors to observe a higher standard of social morality in future. Having heard them, however, I think your arguments would have been wasted. They, at least, are unfit to exist, and as I do not wish to prolong their agony, after they have heard this decision, I propose to deal with them before I complete my judgment.”
I then went with my companion to the two pens which contained them, and drew out the bars on which they rested. As we thought the male culprit was slightly the less repulsive of the two, we soused him first, that his trouble should be the sooner over.
As we commenced to draw the bars, their cries became deafening in volume, and the female, in a frenzy of fear and vituperation, commenced spitting in our direction.
As the last bar withdrew, the male leapt to the uprights at the side, but found that they were made of a material too smooth for his grasp to hold, and he fell backward into the water which bubbled beneath him.
Having disposed of the female in the same way, I resumed my verdict. “The second point, as I have said, is of no more avail than the first, because it appears to me to be a very evil thing that legislators or judges should attempt to exalt the laws they dispense as being higher than the essential justice which they are intended to demonstrate. It should be the greatest difficulty in putting an unjust law into operation that no judges of good character should be found who would consent to enforce it. A judge who solemnly administers a law which he knows in his heart to be unjust is baser than one who takes bribes from a litigant. In the one case he is bribed by an individual to do injustice at some risk to his own position; in the other he is bribed by the State to do injustice, with an assurance that it can be perpetrated with impunity.
“But your third point is of a different quality. To consider it fully would take more time than is now available, and we might all be involved in a common fate the while I should do so. It appears to me that there is force in your contention that the fate to which you have been condemned has an even greater severity than the harshness of your own laws, for which they have condemned you. I am not sure that this is so, but it is at least a plausible and confusing argument. I have endeavoured to consider it from their standpoint, and I think that their reply would be that there is no point in the comparison, because they have acted from different motives, and with different intentions. Your laws are designed to produce certain courses of conduct in your individual citizens, to repress tendencies which might be subversive of the State as it is organised, and as you were content to continue it; you endeavoured (we may hope) to use no more harshness than you considered that these objects required. They have no such objects in view. They do not make you examples to others, nor design to coerce you into observing any rules of future conduct. They regard you as having a mentality so base that it should be destroyed entirely. But you say that they may not have intended that this fate should fall upon you. I think that this is less than possible, for, having heard your arguments, I accept their decision very heartily.”
Saying this I commenced to withdraw the bars, and my companion helped me in silence.
XXVIII
The Fate of the Killers
The horny beak must have been softening in the boiling tank before my mind
