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TRIAL OF JOHN W. WEBSTER. 133
that all the testimony, submitted to you, should be rightly understood,
and that a rigid and exact deduction of every just and legitimate con-
sequence, which results from it, should lead to a clear and satisfactory
conclusion. The deep interest, with which the progress of this solemn
investigation is watched, and the intense anxiety with which its result
is waited for, are not limited to the contracted circle of the friends of
the party who is the immediate object of the prosecution, but they
pervade all classes of society, and all parts of the country; and make
it far transcend, in the universal estimate of its importance, any criminal
accusation which has ever occupied the attention of our judicial
tribunals.
A few months since, a well-known and highly respectable individual
suddenly disappeared from this city. A citizen, allied to a numerous
and influential family, himself afuent, and connected with many great
pecuniary operations in the place where he had dwelt from his birth,-
who had been accustomed, day by day, and month by month, and year
after year, to mingle freely with his fellow-citizens in this community,
-was suddenly lost; and no known cause could be assigned, to account
for his strange and alarming disappearance.
That disappearance was followed by inquiries, broad, extensive,
almost universal. His friends naturally, inevitably, took the deepest
interest in the discovery of his person, if he were alive, or in the recov-
ery of his body, if he were no longer living. They enlisted at once, in
their behalf, the entire police force, and all the official authority of the
city; much more than that,-they enlisted the united sympathies and
the united energies of the whole people in one common service of search
and inquiry. A full week passed by, without bringing one word of
reliable tidings of their departed friend to his anxious and suffering
family, or to an eager and excited community. And when, at length,
all inquiry, and all effort, and all investigation, seemed to be utterly
baffled, and there was no hope left,-when all that pertained to him
from the first moment of his disappearance, seemed to be involved in
impenetrable darkness, a sudden and astonishing report of the discov-
ery of his lifeless body, fell upon us all, filling our hearts with the most
fearful apprehensions. His mangled remains, it was believed, were
brought to light, The perpetrator of the awful crime, by which life
had been taken, and that body reduced to the condition in which it
was found, was said also to have been detected; and the individual, to
whom was imputed this enormous offence, was one, who, in the ordinary
exercise of human judgment, would have been no more likely to have
been suspected of such atrocious criminality, than any one of you, or
of us, who are engaged in the painful duties of the present trial.
These astonishing discoveries were instantaneously followed by a
disclosure to the community, in every form in which they could be made,
of the various circumstances which were supposed to have a tendency
to prove that the mutilated portions of the human body, which were
found in the Medical College, were the remains of Dr. George Park-
man, and that the prisoner at the bar was present at the scene, and
connected with the agencies which were the cause, of his death. Inci-
dent after incident was communicated to the public, and everything
which could bear against this unhappy prisoner, was spread abroad, as
it were, an the wings of the wind. Every sheet that issued from the
daily press,-every hour that passed, were fraught with new revelations,
which were lavishly diffused through all the avenues of society, as evi-
dence at once of the death of Dr. Parkman, and of the guilt of the
prisoner.
In the mean time he was in the cells of your prison, a solitary and
silent sufferer. While every incident tending most injuriously to affect
him, was the subject of daily communication and discussion abroad,
he was alone, without friends, and without help;--for, what could the
feeble efforts of his wife and daughters, from whom he had been separ-
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