Now observe the immense psychological work that this treatment of the story involves--the study of nine or ten completely different characters, no one of whom could resemble a character of the nineteenth century, not at least in the matter of thought and speech. To create these was almost as wonderful as to call the dead of two hundred years ago out of their graves, a veritable necromancy. This work alone would make the book a marvellous thing. But the book is more than marvellous; it is in the highest degree philosophically instructive. Almost anything that happens in this world is judged somewhat after the fashion of the judgments delivered in "The Ring and the Book." For example, let us suppose an episode in Tokyo to-day, rather than an episode in Italy two hundred years ago, a case of killing. At first when the mere fact of the killing is known, there is a great curiosity as to the reason of it, and different newspapers publish different stories about it, and different people who knew both parties express different opinions as to the why and how. You may be sure that none of these accounts is perfectly true--they could not be true, because those from whom the accounts come have no perfect knowledge of the antecedents of the crime. But presently the case comes before the criminal court, with lawyers on both sides, to prosecute and to defend. Each does his duty the very best he can, one trying to convict, one trying to secure acquittal. But do these know the real story from beginning to end? Probably not. It is very seldom indeed that a lawyer can learn the inside, the psychological, history of a crime. He learns only the naked facts, and he must theorise largely from these facts. Finally the judge pronounces judgment. Does the judge know all about the matter? Almost certainly not. His duty is fixed by law in rigid lines, and he cannot depart from those lines; he can sentence only according to the broad conclusions which he draws from the facts. And after the whole thing is over, still the real secrets of the two parties, of the criminal and the victim, remain forever unknown in a majority of cases. Now what does this prove? It proves that human judgment is necessarily very imperfect, and that nothing is so difficult to learn as the absolute truth of motives and of feelings, even when the truth of the facts is unquestionable. Browning's book tells us more than this; it shows us that in some cases, where power and crime are on one side, and poverty and virtue upon the other, the chances against truth being able to make itself heard are just about a thousand to one. Of course the world is a little better to-day than two hundred years ago; murder is less common, justice is less corrupt. But allowing for these things, the chances of a man persecuted by a rich corporation, without reason, perhaps with monstrous cruelty, to obtain even a hearing, would be scarcely better than those of Pompilia in the story of "The Ring and the Book."