Of the noble aims and splendid achievements of the Odd Fellows’ Society, it was hardly necessary for Mr. Porter to speak at length. He could never hope to command language of sufficient force to explain his appreciation of the services rendered to Society by this invaluable organization; but the fact that both he and his client had for years belonged to the sacred brotherhood, to which they gave their energies and their devotion, was a sufficient guarantee of the strength of their affection for it.
In concluding, Mr. Porter merely desired to direct the attention of the gentlemen of the jury to the fact that if designing women were to be permitted to decoy unsuspecting men into contracts of marriage merely for the purpose of securing by artful means repudiation of the contract, so that the ground would be laid for a demand for money, then no man was safe, and no one could tell at what moment he might fall into a snare laid for him by an unprincipled adventuress. Mr. Porter then expressed his entire confidence in the intention of the jury to give a verdict for his client, and he sat down with a feeling that he had discharged his duty in an effective manner.
Mr. Shreek, in reply, observed that he should begin with the assertion that in two particulars this was one of the most remarkable cases that it had ever been his fortune to try. In the first place, he was unable to refer to an occasion, during more than twenty years’ experience at the bar, when he had had the honor of addressing a jury so intelligent and so worthy of being entrusted with interests of the very highest character as this one was; and never had he felt so much confidence as he now felt when he came before these highly-cultivated, keenly sagacious, and thoroughly representative gentlemen to ask for justice, simple justice, for an unhappy woman. In the second place, while it had fallen to his lot to witness more than one painful and repulsive scene, more than one example of the capacity of human beings for reaching the deepest depths of degradation, in their efforts to rob Justice of her own, and to make her very name a by-word and a reproach among the wise and the good, he had never yet received so violent a shock as that which came to him to-day, when, with mortification and grief, he had heard a member of the bar, sworn to seek to uphold the sanctity of the law and the honor of a proud profession, not only misrepresent the truth most villanously, but so far forget his manhood as to stoop to insult, to revile, to smite with a ribald and envenomed tongue, a fair and noble woman, who already bent beneath an awful load of domestic sorrow, and whose only fault was that she had come here to seek redress for an injury the depth of which no tongue could tell, the agony of which the imagination of him who has not fathomed all the mystery of a woman’s love could never hope to realize. He would only say, in dismissing this most distressing and humiliating portion of the subject, that he left the offender to the punishment of a conscience which, hardened and seared though it was, still must have in store for him pangs of remorse of which he, Mr. Shreek, trembled to think.