THE BROOKLYN TRIAL.

New Zealand Times, Volume XXX, Issue 4512, 6 September 1875, Page 3

THE BROOKLYN TRIAL.

The following is the close of a review filling four pages of the supplement to Harper's Weekly for June 5, which contains the best review of this remarkable trial that has yet appeared in print:—■ Two aspects of the case which we have passed over in silence have occupied a great proportion of the time of the judge, jury, and the opposing counsel. These are Mr. Beecher's alleged confessions, verbal and written. We have passed them by because the historian must necessarily dismiss them in a few words. Messrs. Moulton and Tilton swear to repeated confessions of adultery made by Mr. Beecher in language so grossly vulgar that we shall not repeat it here. Mr. Beecher explicitly and indignantly denies the language attributed to him. Charity cannot impute this conflict of testimony to misapprehension, nor all of it to even an intentional misconstruction. Either Mr. Beecher is a liar and a perjurer, or Messrs. Moulton and Tilton are. That the latter were liars they now frankly confess ; for that they both again and again asserted Mr. Beecher's innocence of the crime now charged against him is testified to by many witnesses, and acknowledged, as indeed it could not be denied, by themselves. That the former has ever varied from the truth there is no evidence but theirs except the evidence of Mrs. Moulton. She swears to a confession by Mr. Beecher not less shamelessly explicit. She fixes the date of this interview by a letter ; and it has been proved by the testimony of several independent and disinterested witnesses that Mr. Beecher was not and could not have been with her at the time which she had specified, and he denies that the confession thus imputed to him was ever uttered to her at any time. Denied no less vigorously than the other confessions, with them it must stand or fall. The letters of Mr. Beecher abound in expressions, some of them eloquent in their pathos of remorse. The authorship of these letters, except that penned by Mr. Moulton on January 1, 1871, is not in dispute. Their analysis would transcend our limits. It must suffice to say that Mr. Beecher in a protracted examination went over them one by one, and essayed to explain every word and phrase which they contained. The reader who, from the history of the case, believes Mr. Beecher guilty of the crime attributed to him will, of course, interpret these letters in the light of that conclusion; but he who thinks his innocence consonant with the indisputable facts of the case, will find no difficulty in comprehending his poignant remorse, when made to believe that he had unwittingly suffered a wife to transfer to himself her affections, had unconsciously broken up a household which he loved and in which he had found almost a second home, and had, by harboring suspicions which he was subsequently induced to believe unjust, aided to despoil and destroy a young man of noble possibilities, whom he regarded almost as an adopted son. For the same reason that we have not attempted to analyse Mr. Beecher's correspondence, we have not referred to that of Mr. Tilton and Mr. Moulton. If the former are more easily reconcilable with the theory of Mr. Beecher's guilt, the latter are not easily reconcilable with any other theory than that ef his innocence. Thus far we have endeavored simply to tell the story of the case without interjecting into the narrative our own personal sympathies, prejudices, or judgement. Those sympathies are nevertheless very strong, that judgment is very clear. Under a careful analysis the evidence against Beecher utterly fails. It would not suffice against a man much less strongly intrenched in public esteem than he : against his pure life and noble character it breaks in vain, as the foam of the angry ocean against the cliff which it can obscure but cannot destroy. The case is one of conspiracy against a good and great, though careless, man, but a conspiracy which grew rather than was formed, which was the natural product of the jealousy of self-conceit rather than the deliberate contrivance of greed. On the one side is a man the greatness of whose heart and the credulity of whose sympathies are at once his genius and his weakness ; on the other is a man whose insane jealously is the natural though deadly fruit of an insane selfconceit, embittered by a spirit of personal and fell revenge. He is aided unconsciously by the idolatrous affection and the too implicit obedience of a weak, morbid, and suffering wife, and by the shrewd devices of a " heathen" friend.* The key to the comprehension of this whole case is Mr. Tilton's frank declaration, " I resolved to smite Mr. Beecher to the heart." The arrow was well fashioned, the bow well bent, but the destroyer has failed of his purpose ; and when posterity, wiser than we, reads the history of this case, it will honor, not less than the noble achievements of Henry Ward Beecher's noble life, the no less noble failure of the patience and magnanimity of his only too chivalric and unhappily unsuccessful endeavor to shield " all the other hearts that would acho" from the publication of the famous Brooklyn scandal.