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TRIAL OF JOHN W. WEBSTER. 207
It is impossible to know how igmen will conduct themselves under
the domination of passion, in its highest excitement; in the very moment
which succeeds to the consummation of some event of overwhelming
magnitude. We should hope, and perhaps even we should expect, that
if parties like these came to combat, and the combat went on until it
was closed by death, the survivor of the fatal struggle, still in the
heat of blood, would have rushed from the place of combat, and exclaimed
to the first person whom he met: "God have mercy upon me! I have
killed my friend! From angry words we came to blows: fuel was
added to the flame; and in the heat of passion I smote him to the
earth." I say, we might have hoped that it would have been so; but
who can be sure that it would? Professor Webster occupied an import-
ant position,-was a man of good standing in society. He had a wife
and daughters dependent upon his professional labors and ability; he
was poor; and all before him might look like ruin and desolation. While
his blood was hot and his passion high, and his victim just slain, suppose
that he commits one rash act more? There, surrounded as he was,
by walls which excluded the presence of all witnesses, and shut out
all human observation, the temptation might come upon him to conceal;
and the mutilation of the body would mark the first act in the process
of concealment. From that moment, all disclosure was too late. The
accepted time of salvation, by an open, public disclosure and confession,
was past; and all that ensued was but the necessary consequence of the
first false step, taken after his brother ceased to be a living man. If
the temptation of concealment unfortunately triumphed, all the rest
followed as a natural, perhaps as an inevitable, consequence. The
attempt to avert suspicion,-to shut out proofs,-to turn away inquiry,
would all succeed in the train of events, but as mere matters of course.
It will account for the locking of the doors,-the false statements respect-
ing the interview, and might prompt even the writing of the anonymous
letters, to blind the police, or avert their eyes from the region of the
Medical College. It will, to a considerable degree, account also for
that general composure, even though it were interrupted, in some few
instances, by an observable agitation, which, as you have learned from
the testimony, characterized the demeanor of the prisoner down to the
day of his arrest.
Wrong we may admit all these subsequent actions, artifices, evasions,
and devices to have been. But they were the natural, though deplor-
able, fruit of that first impulsive and ill-judged movement, which
attempted to throw over a fatal event the darkness of an impenetrable
concealment. But it is because they are its consequences, and not its
cause, that all these subsequent acts must be rejected from your consid-
eration, when you come to characterize the original act of criminality.
Review, then, with the care which it deserves, the testimony and
the evidence, in all its parts, and in its various aspects. See the relation
in which these parties stood to each other,-the pursuing and the pur-
sued. How natural, that it should finally prompt to mutual resistance,-
that combat should follow,-that, in the suddenness of passion and in
the heat of blood, life should be lost! And, if it must be, against the
protestations and denials of the prisoner at the bar, that you shall
feel yourselves constrained by the evidence to determine that he was
guilty of any homicide, I appeal to you if all these probabilities,-all
the just inferences from every surrounding circumstance,--do not show
clearly and satisfactorily to any reasonable mind, that the crime could
not have been premeditated murder, but must have been extenuated,
by heat of blood, upon sudden combat, into that still great, though
less dreadful, crime of manslaughter.
I must now, Gentlemen of the Jury. leave this subject,•and pass
to the consideration of other and very different questions. But, before
I enter upon a consideration of the evidence which bears directly upon
Professor Webster, and by which it is attempted to connect him with
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