SERGEANT SAUNDERS thought it prudent to let the emotion subside before opening the defendant's case: so he disarranged his papers, and then rearranged them as before: and, during this, a person employed by Richard Hardie went out and told him this last untoward piece of evidence. He winced: but all was overbalanced by this, that Skinner had not come to bear witness for the Plaintiff.
Sergeant Saunders rose with perfect dignity and confidence,. and delivered a masterly address. In less than ten minutes the whole affair took another colour under that plausible tongue. The tactician began by declaring that the plaintiff was perfectly sane, and his convalescence was a matter of such joy to the defendant, that not even the cruel misinterpretation of facts and motives, to which his amiable client had been exposed, could rob him of that sacred delight "Our case, gentlemen, is, that the plaintiff is sane, and that he owes his sanity to those prompt, wise, and benevolent measures, which we took eighteen months ago, at an unhappy crisis of his mind, to preserve his understanding and his property. Yes, his property, gentlemen; that property which in a paroxysm of mania, he was going to throw away, as I shall show you by an unanswerable document. He comes here to slander us and mulet us out of five thousand pounds; but I shall show you he is already ten thousand pounds the richer for that act of ours, for which he debits us five thousand pounds instead of crediting us twice the sum. Gentlemen, Icannot, like my learned friend, call witnesses from the clouds, from the United States, and from the grave; for it has not occurred to my client strong in the sense of his kindly and honourable intentions, to engage gentlemen from foreign parts, with woolly locks and nasal twangs, to drop in accidentally, and eke out the fatal gaps in evidence. The class of testimony we stand upon is less romantic; it does not seduce the imagination nor play upon the passions; but it is of a much higher character in sober men's eyes, especially in a court of law. I rely, not on witnesses dropped from the clouds, and the stars, and the stripes--to order; nor even on the prejudiced statements of friends and sweethearts, who always swear from the heart rather than from the head and the conscience; but on the calm testimony of indifferent men, and on written documents furnished by the plaintiff', and on contemporaneous entries in the books of the asylum, which entries formally describe the plaintiff's acts, and were put down at the time--at the time, gentlemen--with no idea of a trial at law to come, but in compliance with the very proper provisions of a wise and salutary Act. I shall also lay before you the evidence of the medical witnesses who signed the certificates, men of probity and honour, and who have made these subtle maladies of the mind the special study of their whole life. I shall also call the family doctor, who has known the plaintiff and his ailments, bodily and mental, for many years, and communicated his suspicions to one of the first psychological physicians of the age, declining, with a modesty which we, who know less of insanity than he does, would do well to imitate--declining, I say, to pronounce a positive opinion unfavourable to the plaintiff, till he should have compared notes with this learned man, and profited by his vast experience.
In this strain he continued for a good hour, until the defendants case seemed to be a thing of granite. His oration ended, he called a string of witnesses: every one of whom bore the learned counsel out by his evidence in chief.
But here came the grand distinction between the defendants case and the plaintiff's. Cross-examination had hardly shaken the plaintiff's witnesses: it literally dissolved the defendant's. Osmond was called, and proved Alfred's headaches and pallor, and his own suspicions. But then Colt forced him to admit that many young people had headaches without going mad, and were pale when thwarted in love, without going mad: and that as to the L. 14,000 and the phantom, he _knew_ nothing; but had taken all that for granted on Mr. Richard Hardie's word.
Dr. Wycherley deposed to Alfred's being insane and abnormally irritable, and under a pecuniary illusion, as stated in his certificate: and to his own vast experience. But the fire of cross-examination melted all his polysyllables into guesswork and hearsay. It melted out of him that he, a stranger, had intruded on the young man's privacy, and had burst into a most delicate topic, his disagreement with his father, and so had himself created the very irritation he had set down to madness. He also had to admit that he knew nothing about the L. 14,000 or the phantom, but had taken for granted the young man's own father, who consulted him, was not telling him a deliberate and wicked falsehood.
_Colt._--In short, sir, you were retained to make the man out insane, just as my learned friend there is retained.
_Wycherley._--I think, sir, it would not be consistent with the dignity of my profession to notice that comparison.
_Colt._--I leave defendant's counsel to thank you for that. Come, never mind _dignity;_ let us have a little _truth._ Is it consistent with your dignity to tell us whether the keepers of private asylums pay you a commission for all the patients you consign to durance vile by your certificates?
Dr. Wycherley fenced with this question, but the remorseless Colt only kept him longer under torture, and dragged out of him that he received fifteen per cent. from the asylum keepers for every patient he wrote insane; and that he had an income of eight hundred pounds a year from that source alone. This, of course, was the very thing to prejudice a jury against the defence: and Colt's art was to keep to their level.