On this judicial fiction
the young man, in the name of justice, is sent to prison, punished for a
mere mistake, and a mistake made in pursuance of such advice. It cannot
be, consistently with the radical principles of criminal law to which I
have referred, and the numerous authorities which I have quoted, that
this man was guilty of a crime, that his _mistake_ was a crime, and I
think the judges who pronounced his condemnation, upon their own
principles, better than their victim, deserved the punishment which they
inflicted.
The condemnation of Miss Anthony, her good faith being conceded, would
do no less violence to any fair administration of justice.
One other matter will close what I have to say. Miss Anthony believed,
and was advised that she had a right to vote. She may also have been
advised, as was clearly the fact, that the question as to her right
could not be brought before the courts for trial, without her voting or
offering to vote, and if either was criminal, the one was as much so as
the other. Therefore she stands, now arraigned as a criminal, for taking
the only steps by which it was possible to bring the great
constitutional question as to her right, before the tribunals of the
country for adjudication. If for thus acting, in the most perfect good
faith, with motives as pure and impulses as noble as any which can find
place in your honor's breast in the administration of justice, she is by
the laws of her country to be condemned as a criminal, she must abide
the consequences.
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