Page:Orley Farm (Serial Volume 5).pdf/26

140 attending to what is going on except yourself. I mean to-day to take in the whole theory of Italian jurisprudence.'

'I have no doubt that you may do so with advantage. I do not suppose that it is very good, but it must at any rate be better than our own. Come, let us go back to the town; my pipe is finished.'

'Fill another, there's a good fellow. I can't afford to throw away my cigar, and I hate walking and smoking. You mean to assert that our whole system is bad, and rotten, and unjust?'

'I mean to say that I think so.'

'And yet we consider ourselves the greatest people in the world,—or at any rate the honestest.'

'I think we are; but laws and their management have nothing to do with making people honest. Good laws won't make people honest, nor bad laws dishonest.'

'But a people who are dishonest in one trade will probably be dishonest in others. Now, you go so far as to say that all English lawyers are rogues.'

'I have never said so. I believe your father to be as honest a man as ever breathed.'

'Thank you, sir,' and Staveley lifted his hat.

'And I would fain hope that I am an honest man myself.'

'Ah, but you don't make money by it.'

'What I do mean is this, that from our love of precedent and ceremony and old usages, we have retained a system which contains many of the barbarities of the feudal times, and also many of its lies. We try our culprit as we did in the old days of the ordeal. If luck will carry him through the hot ploughshares, we let him escape though we know him to be guilty. We give him the advantage of every technicality, and teach him to lie in his own defence, if nature has not sufficiently so taught him already.'

'You mean as to his plea of not guilty.'

'No, I don't; that is little or nothing, We ask him whether or no he confesses his guilt in a foolish way, tending to induce him to deny it; but that is not much. Guilt seldom will confess as long as a chance remains. But we teach him to lie, or rather we lie for him during the whole ceremony of his trial. We think it merciful to give him chances of escape, and hunt him as we do a fox, in obedience to certain laws framed for his protection.'

'And should he have no protection?'

'None certainly, as a guilty man; none which may tend towards the concealing of his guilt. Till that be ascertained, proclaimed, and made apparent, every man's hand should be against him.'

'But if he is innocent?'

'Therefore let him be tried with every possible care. I know