Page:The Green Bag (1889–1914), Volume 10.pdf/123

 102

of phantasmagoric fancy are tame beside these bloody tales of iron life. They are a transcript of contemporary manners, and display the secret impulses of the heart, and convulsions and apathies of life, the wavy turmoil of nature. Many a lesson of life as well as of law might be learned from the old reports. The miserable man of lies, with his ears clipped close to the skull, preaches the gospel of truth, and Cranmer, burning at the stake, smiles through the flames upon passing generations, a glorious martyr. In judicial history, plainer than in any other department of human affairs, from the first page of Dyer to the reporter of to-day, from the iron times of the Tudors to the present hour, we may trace the manumis sion of mankind from intellectual and social slavery — we may mark each step along the pathway of progress, liberty and enlight enment. Wager of Battle and War, Sanctuary and Ordeal, the Stocks and the Pillory, the Stake

and the Rack, the Headsman, the Gibbet, the Tower and Tyburn, one by one the evils of the world are passing away; one by one the ramparts reared around the restless activ ities of mankind by superstition and conser vatism have been surmounted, and soon the few which yet remain will add their ruins to the old-world wreck of barbarism, myth ology and intolerance. This development in the old reports is correlative with the growth and culture of man, and the law as it stands to-day is the thought of ages grown into axioms, receiving the unanimous ver dict of the reason and the moral nature. This revelation of truth, this evolution of our nobler nature, this gradual progression toward humanity and Christianity, runs through the ages of the world like Lethe through Hades. In that stream of oblivion the generations drown their sorrow and their sins, and with renewed ardor, bursting the bonds of ignorance, press onward to the era of universal enlightenment, love and liberty.