Dick Hart on his trial for manslaughter, with an array of lawyers against him sufficient to frighten a poor man out of his senses. The lawyers for the prosecution were against him, and strove, by all the ingenuity of long study and sharp experience, to prove him the guiltiest man that ever stood in a felon's dock. The lawyers of the Company were against him, and their aim was to prove the perfect innocence of the powerful directors they represented, and therefore the utter and inexcusable guilt of Dick Hart. Strong odds these against a poor man with an empty purse. A strange road to justice was this on which Dick Hart found himself, unarmed and with bare breast--and with something of a guilty conscience also, for he really did not know how far he was to blame--opposed to the keen intellects of those who were grandly paid to find him guilty. He quivered with helpless rage, he was racked with despair, as he listened to the manner in which the case was stated by his enemies: they were nothing less; they were there to destroy him. But there was a grain of salt for him in the midst of all this great trouble. A young lawyer, not overburdened with briefs, undertook his defence for the love of the thing, and pleaded so ably that he very nearly succeeded in proving Dick Hart innocent--as undoubtedly he was. Unfortunately, he could not prove that Dick Hart was not immediately responsible for the accident; but he did prove that the man, by excessive overwork, was so prostrate from fatigue, that it would have been almost next to a miracle had an accident not occurred. "Perhaps," said this daring champion, to the admiration of Jim Podmore, who nodded his head in confirmation and approbation at every thrust the lawyer made--"perhaps you will say that the prisoner was wrong in allowing himself to be so overtasked; but he has a wife and child dependent on him for support, and his wife is now at home, expecting every hour to saddle him with another responsibility. The prisoner is a hardworking man, and a poor man, and had he refused to perform the duties required of him, never mind at what sacrifice to himself, never mind at what peril to the public--as has been too often unhappily proved in other cases--he would have stood a fair chance of being dismissed from the service of the Company. If this case serves in any way to direct public attention to the manner in which too many servants of the railway companies are overworked, it will be fortunate that it is tried; but the prisoner must not be made the victim of a bad and abominable system. Not many days ago the coroner of Middlesex, at an inquest held upon the body of an engine-fitter, who was crushed to death between two engines, stated that no fewer than thirty railway servants are killed in his district every year; and he very pertinently wished to know whether such wholesale slaughter was altogether necessary. This is not the question for you to answer now, but it may lead you to a merciful view of the