Page 118 - erewhon

CHAPTER XII:

MALCONTENTS

confess that I felt rather unhappy when I got home, and
I thought more closely over the trial that I had just wit-
nessed. For the time I was carried away by the opinion of
those among whom I was. They had no misgivings about
what they were doing. There did not seem to be a person in
the whole court who had the smallest doubt but that all was
exactly as it should be. This universal unsuspecting confi-
dence was imparted by sympathy to myself, in spite of all
my training in opinions so widely different. So it is with
most of us: that which we observe to be taken as a matter
of course by those around us, we take as a matter of course
ourselves. And after all, it is our duty to do this, save upon
grave occasion.
But when I was alone, and began to think the trial over,
it certainly did strike me as betraying a strange and unten-
able position. Had the judge said that he acknowledged the
probable truth, namely, that the prisoner was born of un-
healthy parents, or had been starved in infancy, or had met
with some accidents which had developed consumption;
and had he then gone on to say that though he knew all this,
and bitterly regretted that the protection of society obliged
him to inflict additional pain on one who had suffered so

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