Jurisprudence in New York.
By The Stockholder
REMARKABLE events in this singular city of ours are framing history before our eyes, with little remark from their nearest and most interested spectators. That spectacles like those daily unrolling in our presence do not notably evoke contemporary criticism is no novel instance in memorable periods in human affairs. It will be for those who write our annals for other times, the Macaulays of coming generations, to display these occurrences in their true perspective. The pending trial of Stokes for the homicide of Fisk involves a sequence of effects, dramatic and picturesque to the present observer, and grave with immediate and ultimate importance to all individuals and to the State. One of the most noted men of his country and time is slain by a successful rival in the affections of evidently one of the most fascinating women of her class—a class, however, which happily can never touch the tender regard the world is willing to pay to the memory of Cleopatra, nor claim any share of the delicate grace which adorned Aspasia. Nor to the fallen rival, although by the blare of his life and the catastrophe of his death a hero to half the population in a republic of millions, does the wildest flattery ascribe the great courageous heart of Antony or any part of the eloquence and patriotism of Pericles. It is not, let us observe, on the character or fate of the slayer or slain that the reader needs to linger. The survivor, arraigned for his life puts on trial the tribunal which chose the grand jury that presents the indictment against him. Meantime, the judge presiding at the trial, before whom the grand jury is impeached, is himself contemporaneously on trial, with no chance of appeal, before the highest law-giving power of the State, summoned to answer charges which, if proven, terminate his official career. He has adjourned the Stokes issue from day to day in order to meet his own impeachers of the higher jurisdiction; the felon has waited that the trial of his judge might go on. Concurrently with this unparalleled exhibition, the magistrate who presided at the choice of the grand jury that Stokes impeaches—the chief magistrate of a municipality of a million people—is also on trial charged with offenses which, if proven, not only terminate his official career, but moreover, consign his person to a felon's cell. Were ever stranger complications evolved in the brain that conceived the marvels of the Arabian Nights!—The Stockholder.