The Works of Robert G. Ingersoll Volume XI Part 42

No one, so far as I know, asks that men shall be tried by partial and prejudiced jurors, or that judges shall be allowed to disregard the law for the sake of securing convictions, or that verdicts shall be allowed to stand unsupported by sufficient legal evidence. Yet they talk as if they asked for these very things. We must remember that revenge is always in haste, and that justice can always afford to wait until the evidence is actually heard.

There should be no delay except that which is caused by taking the time to find the truth. Without such delay courts become mobs, before which, trials in a legal sense are impossible. It might be better, in a city like New York, to have the grand jury in almost perpetual session, so that a man charged with crime could be immediately indicted and immediately tried. So, the highest court to which appeals are taken should be in almost constant session, in order that all appeals might be quickly decided.

But we do not wish to take away the right of appeal. That right tends to civilize the trial judge, reduces to a minimum his arbitrary power, puts his hatreds and pa.s.sions in the keeping and control of his intelligence.

That right of appeal has an excellent effect on the jury, because they know that their verdict may not be the last word. The appeal, where the accused is guilty, does not take the sword from the State, but it is a shield for the innocent.

In England there is no appeal. The trials are shorter, the judges more arbitrary, the juries subservient, and the verdict often depends on the prejudice of the judge. The judge knows that he has the last guess--that he cannot be reviewed--and in the pa.s.sion often engendered by the conflict of trial he acts much like a wild beast.

The case of Mrs. Maybrick is exactly in point, and shows how dangerous it is to clothe the trial judge with supreme power.

Without doubt there is in this country too much delay, and this, it seems to me, can be avoided without putting the life or liberty of innocent persons in peril. Take only such time as may be necessary to give the accused a fair trial, before an impartial jury, under and in accordance with the established forms of law, and to allow an appeal to the highest court.

The State in which a criminal cannot have an impartial trial is not civilized. People who demand the conviction of the accused without regard to the forms of law are savages.

But there is another side to this question. Many people are losing confidence in the idea that punishment reforms the convict, or that capital punishment materially decreases capital crimes.

My own opinion is that ordinary criminals should, if possible, be reformed, and that murderers and desperate wretches should be imprisoned for life. I am inclined to believe that our prisons make more criminals than they reform; that places like the Reformatory at Elmira plant and cultivate the seeds of crime.

The State should never seek revenge; neither should it put in peril the life or liberty of the accused for the sake of a hasty trial, or by the denial of appeal.

In my judgment, defective as our criminal courts and methods are, they are far better than the English.

Our judges are kinder, more humane; our juries nearer independent, and our methods better calculated to ascertain the truth.

THE BIGOTRY OF COLLEGES.

* A newspaper dispatch from Lawrence, Kansas, published yesterday, stated that Col. Robert O. Ingersoll had been invited by the law students of the Kansas State University to address them at the commencement exercises, and that the faculty council had objected and had invited Chauncey M.

Depew instead.

The dispatch also stared that the council had notified representatives of the law school that if they insisted on the great Agnostic speaking before the school, the faculty would take heroic measures to thwart their design.

It was also stated that the law students had made it clearly understood that the lecture Ingersoll had been invited to deliver was to be on the subject of law, and that his views on religion, the Bible and the Deity were not to be alluded to, and they considered that the faculty council had "subjected them to an insult," and had gone out of its way, also, to affront Colonel Ingersoll without cause.

Colonel Ingersoll, when seen yesterday and questioned about the matter, took it, as he does all things of that nature, philosophically and in a true manly spirit.

Chauncey M. Depew was seen at his residence, No. 43 West Fifty-fourth Street, last night and asked if he had been invited to address the students of the Kansas University in the place of Colonel Ingersoll. He said he had not.

"Would you go if you were invited?" he was asked.

"No; I would not," he answered. "You see, I am so busy here; besides, my social and semi-political engagements are such that I would not have time to go to such a distant point, anyhow.

"No, I do not care to express any opinion regarding the action of the faculty council of the Kansas University, but I consider Colonel Ingersoll one of the greatest intellects of the century, from whose teaching all can profit."--The Journal, New York, January 24, im.

UNIVERSITIES are naturally conservative. They know that if suspected of being really scientific, orthodox Christians will keep their sons away, so they pander to the superst.i.tions of the times.

Most of the universities are exceedingly poor, and poverty is the enemy of independence. Universities, like people, have the instinct of self-preservation. The University of Kansas is like the rest.

The faculty of Cornell, upon precisely the same question, took exactly the same action, and the faculty of the University of Missouri did the same. These inst.i.tutions must be the friends and defenders of superst.i.tion.

The Vanderbilt College, or University of Tennessee, discharged Professor Winch.e.l.l because he differed with the author of Genesis on geology.

These colleges act as they must, and we should blame n.o.body. If Humboldt and Darwin were now alive they would not be allowed to teach in these inst.i.tutions of "learning."

We need not find fault with the president and professors. They want to keep their places. The probability is that they would like to do better--that they desire to be free, and, if free, would, with all their hearts, welcome the truth. Still, these universities seem to do good.

The minds of their students are developed to that degree, that they naturally turn to me as the defender of their thoughts.

This gives me great hope for the future. The young, the growing, the enthusiastic, are on my side. All the students who have selected me are my friends, and I thank them with all my heart.

A YOUNG MAN'S CHANCES TO-DAY.

* Col. Robert G. Ingersoll represents what is intellectually highest among the whole world's opponents of religion. He counts theology as the science of a superst.i.tion. He decries religion as it exists, and holds that the broadest thing a man, or all human nature, can do is to acknowledge ignorance when it cannot know. He accepts nothing on faith. He is the American who is forever asking, "Why?"--who demands a reason and material proof before believing.

As Christianity's corner-stone is faith, he rejects Christianity, and argues that all men who are broad enough to know when to narrow their ideas down to fact or demonstrable theory must reject it. Believe as he does or not, all Americans must be interested in him. His mind is marvelous, his tongue is silvern, his logic is invincible-- as logic.

Col. Ingersoll is a shining example of the oft-quoted fact that, given mental ability, health and industry, a young man may make for himself whatever place in life he desires and is fitted to fill. His early advantages were limited, for his father, a Congregational minister whose field of labor often changed, was a man of far too small an income to send his sons to college. Whatever of mental training the young man had he was obliged to get by reason of his own exertion, and his splendid triumphs as an orator, and his solid achievements as a lawyer are all the result of his own efforts. The only help he had was that which is the common heritage of all American young men--the chance to fight even handed for success. It is not surprising, therefore, that Col. Ingersoll feels a deep interest in every bright young man of his acquaintance who is struggling manfully for the glittering prize so brilliantly won by the great Agnostic himself. He does not believe, however, that the young man who goes out mto the world nowadays to seek his fortune has so easy a battle to fight as had the young men of thirty years ago. In conversation with the writer Col. Ingersoll spoke earnestly upon this subject.

Col. Ingersoll's views regarding the Bible and Christianity were not generally understood by the public for some time after he had become famous as an orator, although he began to diverge from orthodoxy when quite young, and was as p.r.o.nounced an Agnostic when he went into the army, as he is now.

Col. Ingersoll is an inch less than six feet tall, and weighs ten more than two hundred pounds. He will be sixty- one next August, and his hair is snowy. His shoulders are broad and as straight as they were eighteen years ago when he electrified a people and place! his own name upon the list of a nation's greatest orators with his matchless "Plumed Knight" speech in nominating

James G. Blaine for the presidency. His blue eyes look straight into yours when he speaks to you, and his sentences are punctuated by engaging little tricks of facial expression--now the brow is criss-crossed with the lines of a frown, sometimes quizzical and sometimes indignant--next, the smooth-shaven lips break into a curving smile, which may grow into a broad grin if the point just made were a humorous one, and this is quite likely to be followed by a look of sueh intense earnestness that you wonder if he will ever smile again. And all the time his eyes flash, illuminating, sometimes antic.i.p.atory, glances that add immensely to the clearness with which the thought he is expressing is set before you. He delights to tell a story, and he never tells any but good ones, but--and in this he is like Lincoln--he is apt to use his stories to drive some proposition home. This is almost invariably true, even when he sets out to spin a yarn for the story's simple sake. His mentality seems to be duplex, quadruplex, multiplex, if you please--and while his lips and tongue are effectively delivering the story, his wonderful brain is, seemingly, unconsciously applying the point of the story to the proving of a pet theory, and when the tale has been told the verbal application follows.

His birthplace was Dresden, N. Y. His early boyhood was pa.s.sed in New York State and his youth and young manhood in Illinois, Ohio and Wisconsin.

His handgrasp is hearty and his manner and words are the very essence of straightforward directness. I called at his office once when the Colonel was closeted with a person who wished to retain him in a law case involving a good deal of money. After a bit I was told that I could see him, and as I entered he was saying: "The case can't be won, for you are in the wrong. I don't want it."

"But," pleaded the would-be client, "It seems to me that a good deal can be done in such a case by the way it is handled before the jury, and I thought if you were to be the man I might get a verdict."

"No, sir," was the reply, and the words fell like the lead of a plumb line; "I won't take it. Good morning, sir."

It has been sometimes said, indulgently, of Col. Ingersoll that he is indolent, but no one can hold that view who is at all familiar with him or his work. As a matter of fact, his industry is phenomenal, though, indeed, it is not carried on after the fashion of less brainy men. When he has an important case ahead of him his devotion to the mastery of its details absorbs him at once and completely. It sometimes becomes necessary for him to take up a line of chemical inquiry entirely new to him; again, to elaborate genealogical researches are necessary; still again, it may be essential for him to thoroughly inform himself concerning hitherto uninvestigated local historical records. But whatever is needful to be studied he studies, and so thoroughly that his mind becomes saturated with the knowledge required. And once acquired no sort of information ever leaves him, for he has a memory quite as marvelous as any other of his altogether marvelous characteristics.

It is the same when he has an address to prepare. Every authority that can be consulted upon the subject to be treated in the address, is consulted, and often the material that suggests some of the most telling points is one which no one but Ingersoll himself would think of referring to.

Here again his wonderful memory stands him in good stead for he has packed away within the convolutions of his brain a lot of facts that bear upon almost every conceivable branch of human thought or investigation.

His memory is quite as retentive of the features of a man he has seen as of other matters; it retains voices also, as a war time friend of his discovered last summer. It was a busy day with the Colonel, who had given instructions to his office boy that under no circ.u.mstances was he to be disturbed; so when his old friend called he was told that Col. Ingersoll could not see him "But," said the visitor: "I must see him. I haven't seen him for twenty years; I am going out of town this afternoon, and I wouldn't miss talking with him for a few minutes for a good deal of money."

"Well," said the boy, "he wasn't to be disturbed by anybody."

At this moment the door of the Colonel's private office opened, and the Colonel's portly form appeared upon the scene.