Hours before court time the next morning an immense crowd packed the streets around the building, and when the doors were opened it was useless to attempt the enforcement of the ticket rule. When the court convened the space outside the rail was jammed with a crowd that threatened to overflow the space inside which was reserved for members of the legal profession, witnesses, and the family of the defendant. It was an orderly crowd, however, and the tension of silence was so complete that it held them in a kind of paralysis of attention when the gavel fell and the stentorian voice of the bailiff called his "Hear ye." As soon as he sat down the Court recognized Silvia. She took her place at the end of the counsel table with a few papers within reach. The district attorney noticed with satisfaction that they were very few. She was gowned in pure white, and her hair rippled back from her broad forehead, and with head proudly erect and with easy, natural pose, she faced the jury, which gave her instant and absorbed attention. She spoke slowly, deliberately, and her soft, musical voice was heard distinctly in every corner of the courtroom. "Gentlemen of the Jury: Human life is the greatest mystery in a universe of mystery. It springs into existence with the knowledge of the ages coursing through its sensibilities and inherently possessing all of the passion and prejudice of countless centuries. Where it started none of us knows. Where the aeons ahead of us destine it to end none of us can tell. Deliberately to blot from this earth and its service that which comes into the world so divinely equipped with knowledge and inspiration requires both sublime courage and indescribable depravity; sublime courage to invite the hostility of the vast, complicated, mysterious forces that are embodied in a human life, however humble it may be; indescribable depravity to destroy the most useful and the most beautiful product of this earth. "Yet the statute in this and other American States for the punishment of those who take human life is made to apply but to a fraction of those guilty of such offense. The individual who shoots or otherwise takes the life of another is always prosecuted and generally punished. The association, whose culpable neglect of the ordinary dictates of humanity in making its employees safe, is not even prosecuted for factory girls destroyed in a fire, for miners entombed in the earth, for passengers and trainmen hurled to their death that dividends may be wrung from soft roadbeds and rotten rails, for excursion boats so built as to prevent the saving of passengers in case of accident; and what must be said of those economic and social conditions that drive thousands to self-destruction every year and that destroy all Christian and political ideals, the proper development of which would preclude the possibility of crime!