The little juror flushed with pleasure. Higgin was giving him the opportunity he had been looking for.
“Because I am an atheist,” he blurted out: “I do not believe in a God.”
Higgin gave him a withering look and waved him out of the box with his gouty hand, and another juror was chosen and sworn. Even then, outraged as Higgin’s feelings were, I think nothing would have happened, but the pertinacious juror jumped up and said, “I suppose I may go.”
This was too much for Higgin’s patience, and with all the solemnity at his command Higgin delivered the following sentence: “No, sir, you may not go. You are summoned here as a citizen to take part in these proceedings as a juror. If I am to believe your word――and, unfortunately, I see no reason to doubt it――the oath that has been offered to you would not be binding on your conscience, and there is no law enabling you to qualify yourself for your duties. At the same time, you have been rightly summoned here, and it is your duty to be present from the sitting of the court at nine-thirty until the court rises for the day. Go into yonder gallery,” continued Higgin, pointing up to a solitary gallery opposite the bench, “and continue there, under pain of fine and imprisonment, until the sessions are concluded, from which place it will be your privilege to watch the proceedings of twelve honest Englishmen who do believe in God.”
I think at the end of the harangue, so impressively did Higgin deliver it, that the juror expected to hear that he was “to be hanged by the neck until he was dead.” He slunk away to his lonely gallery, and Higgin never failed to make him a special bow of recognition every time he entered the court.
The sentences given by Higgin seemed to me terrible and almost brutal, but, as a matter of fact, the class of criminal dealt with is a very difficult proposition. Parliament provides no other way of keeping him out of mischief than penal servitude. If he is constantly in and out of prison he is a source of anxiety and wretchedness to his family and a dangerous nuisance to the public. Higgin’s view was that when a man insisted on living by theft, society ought to keep him out of mischief, and, though it is a rough and perhaps cruel method of doing it, the sentimentalist would probably be better employed in instituting some kinder form of asylum for the hopeless cases than in vainly clamouring for their release from prison. There is at least as much to be said for the judge who put the Dartmoor shepherd in prison as for the statesman who let him out.