“Here is a boy who by day and by night, in season and out, was talking of the superman, owing no obligations to anyone, believing whatever gave him pleasure he should do – believing it just as another man might believe a religion.
“You remember that I asked Dr. Ball about these religious cases and he said, ‘Yes, many people go to the insane asylum on account of them.’ I asked Dr. Ball whether the same thing might come from a philosophical belief, and he said, ‘If one believed in it strongly enough.’ And we know this about Nietzsche: He was insane for fifteen years before the time of his death. His very doctrine is a species of insanity.”
Judd’s mouth opened. Then he sank back.
“Here is a man,” Wilk continued, “who made his impress upon the world. Every student of philosophy knows him. His doctrines made him a maniac. And here is a young boy in the adolescent age, harassed by everything that harasses children, who takes this philosophy and believes it literally. It is his life. Do you suppose this mad act could have been done by him in any other way?
“He did it, obsessed of an idea, perhaps to some extent influenced by what has not been developed publicly in this case – perversions that were present in the boy.” Intimately, to the judge, he said,” Both are signs of insanity, both, together with this act, proving a diseased mind.
“Why should this boy’s life be bound up with Friedrich Nietzsche, who died twenty-four years ago, insane, in Germany? I don’t know. I only know it is.
“I know, Your Honour, that every atom of life in all this universe is bound up together. I know that a pebble cannot be thrown into the ocean without disturbing every drop of water in the sea. I know that every life is inextricably mixed and woven with every other life. I know that every influence, conscious and unconscious, acts and reacts on every living organism, and that no one can fix the blame. I know that all life is a series of infinite chances, which sometimes result one way and sometimes another. I have not the infinite wisdom that can fathom it; neither has any other human brain. But I do know that if back of it is a power that made it, that power alone can tell, and if there is no power, then it is an infinite chance, which man cannot solve. Tell me that you can visit the wrath of fate and chance and life and eternity upon a nineteen-year-old boy! If you could, justice would be a travesty and mercy a fraud!”
Then if it was the encounter with Nietzsche’s philosophy that had drawn out a capacity for evil in Judd, who was to blame for that encounter? Could the publishers of Nietzsche’s works be blamed? Could the university be blamed? “I do not believe that the universities are to blame. I do not think they should be held responsible. I do think, however, that they are too large, and that they should keep a closer watch, if possible, upon the individual.
“But you cannot destroy thought because, forsooth, some brain may be deranged by thought. It is the duty of the university, as I conceive it, to be the great storehouse of the wisdom of the ages, and to let students go there, and learn, and choose. Every changed idea in the world has had its consequences. Every new religious doctrine has created its victims. Every new philosophy has caused suffering and death. Every new machine has carved up men while it served the world. No great ideal but does good and harm, and we cannot stop because it may do harm.”
He paused there; he seemed to have done with Judd’s philosophy, and on Judd’s face there came a blank look – was he thus meagrely explained to the world? Was this all his life was worth?
“Your Honour, there is something else in this case that is stronger still than the elements I have spoken of before. There is the element of chance. These boys, neither one of them, could possibly have committed this act except by coming together. It was not the act of one; it was the act of two.
“Your Honour, I am sorry for poor Paulie Kessler, and I think anybody who knows me knows that I am not saying it simply to talk. I do not know what Paulie Kessler would have been had he grown to a man. But would it mean anything if on account of that death, these two boys were taken out and a rope tied around their necks and they died felons? No, Your Honour, the unfortunate and tragic death of Paulie Kessler should mean an appeal to the fathers and the mothers, to the teachers, to the religious guides, to society at large. It should mean an appeal to all of them to appraise children, to understand the emotions that control them, to understand the ideas that possess them, to teach them to avoid the pitfalls of life.”
As he began again in the afternoon, he was once more the skilled lawyer making his points. He came to the sorest point, the testimony of McNamara about a “friendly judge”.
“I want Your Honour to know that if in your judgment you think these boys should hang, we will know it is your judgment. It is hard enough for a court to sit where you sit, with the eyes of the world upon you, in the fierce heat of public opinion, for and against. It is hard enough, without any lawyer making it harder. I will say no more about it, excepting that this statement was a deliberate lie, made out of whole cloth, and McNamara’s entire testimony shows it.”
Horn’s face was solid anger. If Wilk had planned this as a taunt, he could not have devised a more effective provocation, as we were to find in the very last moments of the trial.
Wilk walked again toward the bench, resuming his plea. “Your Honour, I must hasten along, for I will close tonight. I know I should have closed before. Still there seems so much that I would like to say.
“Crime has a cause as certainly as disease, and the way to rationally treat any abnormal condition is to remove the cause.
“If a doctor were called on to treat typhoid fever he would probably try to find out what kind of water the patient drank, and clean out the well so that no one else could get typhoid from the same source. But if a lawyer were called on to treat a typhoid patient he would give him thirty days in jail, and then he would think that nobody else would ever dare to drink the impure water. If the patient got well in fifteen days, he would be kept until his time was up; if the disease was worse at the end of thirty days, the patient would be released because his time was out.
“As a rule, lawyers are not scientists. They think that there is only one way to make men good, and that is to put them in such terror that they do not dare to do bad.”
And then he spoke of an aspect of the crime that few had considered. Going back over the record of hangings, he showed that a recent change had taken place. For years, no minor had been hanged in Chicago, not even on a jury conviction. Not from 1912 until 1920. “In 1920, a boy named Viani was convicted by a jury and hanged, a boy of eighteen. Why did we go back to hanging the young? It was 1920; we were used to young men, mere boys, going to their death. It was 1920, just after the war. And that time is still with us, Your Honour.
“We are anew accustomed to blood, Your Honour. It used to make us feel squeamish. But we have not only seen it shed in bucketsful, we have seen it shed in rivers, lakes, and oceans, and we have delighted in it; we have preached it, we have worked for it, we have advised it, we have taught it to the young, until the world has been drenched in blood and it has left stains upon every human heart and upon every human mind, and has almost stifled the feelings of pity and charity that have their natural home in the human breast.
“I believed in it. I don’t know whether I was crazy or not. Sometimes I think perhaps I was. I urged men to fight. I was safe because I was too old to go. For four long years the civilized world was engaged in killing men. Christian against Christian, barbarians uniting with Christians to kill Christians; anything to kill. It was taught in every school, aye, in the Sunday schools. The little children played at war. Do you suppose that this world has even been the same since then?