Page:Paul Clifford Vol 3.djvu/289

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PAUL CLIFFORD.
281

find too, that my life has not passed through a career of outrage, without scattering some few benefits on the road. In destroying me, it is true that you will have the consolation to think, that among the benefits you derive from my sentence, will be the salutary encouragement you give to other offenders, to offend to the last degree, and to divest outrage of no single aggravation! But if this does not seem to you any very powerful inducement, you may pause before you cut off from all amendment a man who seems neither wholly hardened nor utterly beyond atonement. My Lord, my Counsel would have wished to summon witnesses, some to bear testimony to redeeming points in my own character, others to invalidate the oath of the witness against me; a man whom I saved from destruction, in order that he might destroy me. I do not think either necessary. The public press has already said of me what little good does not shock the truth; and had I not possessed something of those qualities which society does not disesteem, you would not have beheld me here at this hour! If I had saved myself as well as my companions, I should have