or it could never afterwards have the peace of a still and quiet conscience. Experience has shown the danger of act ing on the unconfirmed evidence of the female in a case of an alleged criminal assault. In a late case the judge seems to have usurped the office of the jury.and pro cured a conviction upon such unsupported evidence. The woman then confessed her voluntary consent and offered to plead guilty to a charge of perjury. On this statement the man was discharged. Then the woman retracted her confession, and asserted the truth of her evidence. Every one had had enough of her, and the woman was also dis charged. As soon as it appeared that the alleged assault was said to have been made in the room of a single man, early in the morning, before he had dressed, whither the woman had gone to sell him a book; that it was in an apartment house where there were many occupants; that there was no outcry, no confirmatory proof; an old-time judge would have said to her, " Go at once!"
and would not have postponed the injunction in the eighth chapter of John's Gospel until she had disgraced herself and made the court an object of ridicule and contempt. I would not have any Job of the present generation say to these judges of old time, "No doubt ye are the people, and wisdom shall die with you." But as Abraham Lin coln, in early life, said of the men of the Revolution, so would one who knew their worth say of them : " They were a fortress of strength, but what the invading foemen could never do, the silent artillery of time has done, — the leveling of its walls. They are gone. They were a forest of giant oaks; but the resistless hurricane has swept over them and left only here and there a lonely trunk, despoiled of its verdure, shorn of its foliage, to murmur in a few more gentle breezes, and then to sink and be no more. . . . But they will not be forgotten. In history they will be read of and their services re counted so long as our Bible shall be read and revered."
