The Loeb-Leopold case - The Clarence Darrow Collection

Th& Loeb-Leopold Case
who perhaps cannot be as well defended as these
have been, those who may go down in the tempest,
without aid. It is of them I am thinking, and for
them I am begging of this court not to turn backward
toward the barbarous and cruel past.
Now, your Honor, who are these two boys? Leo-
pold, with a wonderfully brilliant mind; Loeb, with
an unusual intelligence; both from their very youth
crowded like hothouse plants, to learn more and
more and more. Dr. Krohn says that they are
intelligent. In spite of that, it is true: they are un-
usually intelligent. But it takes something besides
brains to make a human being who can adjust
himself to life.
In fact, as Dr. Church and Dr. Singer regretfully
admitted, brains are not the chief essential in human
conduct. There is no question about it. The emo-
tions are the urge that makes us live; the urge that
makes us work or play, or move along the pathways
of life. They are the instinctive things. In fact,
intellect is a late development of life. Long before
it was evolved, the emotional life kept the organism
in existence until death. Whatever our action is, it
comes from the emotions, and nobody is balanced
without them.
Four or five years ago the world was startled by a
story about a boy of eleven, the youngest boy ever
turned out at Harvard, who had studied everything
on earth and understood it. All questions of science
and philosophy he could discuss with the most
152