But the throngs that filled
the courtroom were quiet and well ordered, and the justified
interested outnumbered the morbid.
The writer deprecates the impulse which leads judges, from a
feeling that justice should be publicly administered, to throw
wide the doors of every courtroom, irrespective of the
subject-matter of the trial. We need have no fear of Star
Chamber proceedings in America, and no harm would be done by
excluding from the courtroom all persons who have no business
there.
It is, of course, not unnatural that in the course of a trial
occupying weeks or months the tension should occasionally be
relieved by a gleam of humor. After one has been busy trying
a case for a couple of weeks one goes to court and sets to
work in much the same frame of mind in which one would attack
any other business. But the fact that a small boy sometimes
sees something funny at a funeral, or a bevy of giggling
shop-girls may be sitting in the gallery at a fashionable
wedding, argues little in respect to the solemnity or beauty
of the service itself.
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