THE JAIL
with certainty, but there were a number of indications which might corroborate the identity of Lamm with the unknown culprit.
The artillery-man related that he did not know whether the accused Lamm had taken those boots for which he was being prosecuted, but that he himself had most assuredly not apropriated them.
The king of Magyar pickpockets declared solemnly that it was his duty towards his personal honour and the honour of the chivalrous nation of which he was a member, not to inculpate by his evidence a man who perhaps was not guilty. From his own experience he knew to what lengths human cunning and malice could go, and he himself was suffering for transgressions which he had never committed. The pocket-book which had been found on him, had been given him by an unknown man to take care of: he had not even looked into it, and it was not beyond the bounds of possibility that the unknown man was his sworn enemy, who in this way wished to deprive him of his honour and ruin his social position. Of course,—whether the accused, whom by the way, he did not know, had impersonated him incognito in all the remaining thefts with which he had been charged also unjustly, he could not say. But if this were the case, he demanded that he should be severely punished, and that he himself should be immediately released, for "justice above all“ was the lustrous motto of the Magyar nation.
This concluded the case for the prosecution. The supreme provost-marshal then spoke as follows:
"Gentlemen, we are living in times which both in their significance and in their horror surpass everything of which humanity has hitherto been a witness. Whether we search in the remotest and darkest recesses of human history, whether we pass the bygone centuries in review, we shall find nothing that resembles these days of ours. The dreadful "bellum omnium contra Omnes", that phrase from the
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