The slightest reference may unprison the foul gases of that trial; it is best to regard it as the necessary result of a nervous and physical strain too great to be borne. Day after day, in an English court of law, before a British jury and the senior judge of the King's Bench Division there was recited a tale of intrigue and debauchery from which the librettist of a melodrama would have turned away in unbelief and the alienist in disgust. Honoured names were introduced as pegs for the charge of treason and sexual perversion; the educational influence of the press was exerted to secure that a hundred thousand villages should be made acquainted with the bewildering nomenclature of infamous vices. When the original newspaper charges were met with a countercharge of criminal libel, the direction of the judge and the intelligence of a British jury resulted in a verdict of "Not Guilty." And there was cheering in court and in the street. And some people believed that, as the prisoner had been acquitted, the charges must be true. After three years we can look back on judge and jury, prisoner and public with less disgust than pity; to the psychologist the Pemberton-Billing trial is a reminder that he must be on his guard whenever he hears stereotyped phrases about the political instinct, the justice and sanity, still more the chivalry of the English. Not even as a political manœuvre was it successful. The "low intelligence and high credulity"[45] of a public which, periodically and in the last resort, is entrusted with an imperial mission among several hundred millions of people may be measured by the belief accorded to a single allegation. In the course of the trial frequent reference was made to a "black book," then romantically entrusted to the blackmailing custody of Prince Wilhelm of Wied, in which were recorded the names of at least 47,000 people who occupied some prominent position in English society and who lay, by reason of their vices, at the mercy of the first enemy who threatened them. Any one whose work has taken him among books, any one who has had occasion to consult a card-index, would know that it requires a bulky catalogue to print, even in "brilliant," 47,000 names with enough crimesheet to each to ensure that its bearer could be hushed or drummed out of public life. The book, whatever its size, was filled with matter so confidential that, when a taste of its contents was to be offered to an officer who was conveniently dead before the case came to trial, it had to be carried beyond the reach of spies and eavesdroppers and laid bare under the sky of the English countryside; there was no room, there was no open space in London where its guilty secrets could be revealed. The limits of a novelist's daring are more quickly reached than those of a jury's simple faith.