possessed at this crisis the same general good-will he had enjoyed four
years before, he might have bid defiance to the rage of his enemies, and
have escaped, in spite of all the suspicious circumstances by which he
stood environed. For the general drift of sentiment in the West has
always been against capital penalties, and it is next to impossible
to carry such penalties into effect against a popular favorite. In a
country like this we might as soon expect to see the hands of a clock
move in a direction contrary to the machinery by which it is governed,
as a jury to run counter to plainly declared popular feelings. There may
now and then be instances of their acquitting contrary to the general
sentiment, where that sentiment is unimpassioned; but we much doubt
whether there has ever occurred a single example of a jury convicting a
person in whose favor the sympathy of a whole community was warmly and
earnestly expressed. Of such sympathy Captain Wilde had none; for to the
great majority he was known only as the exciseman, and as such was an
object of hostility. Not that this hostility at any time took the form
of insult and abuse,--for we are proud to say that outside of the large
towns such disgraceful exhibitions of feeling are unknown,--but it
left the minds of the general mass liable to be operated on by all
the suspicious circumstances of the case, and by the slanders of the
personal enemies of the accused.

On the 23d of November, an immense crowd of people, both men and women,
were assembled in the court-house at ---- to witness a trial which was
to fix a dark stain on the judicial annals of Kentucky, and in which,
for the thousandth time, a court of justice was to be led fatally astray
by the accursed thing called Circumstantial Evidence, and made the
instrument of that most deplorable of all human tragedies, a formal,
legalized murder. It is one of the most glaring inconsistencies of our
law, that it admits, in a trial where the life of a citizen is at stake,