was at once his wife and his client, and perhaps
further incited by sensational newspaper articles which
stirred up the memory of his resentment for fancied wrongs,
and taunted him with the humiliation of threats unfulfilled.

The close of Judge Terry's life ends a career and an era. He
had the misfortune to carry into a ripened state of society
the conditions which are tolerable only where social order is
not fully established. Restless under authority, and putting
violence above law, he lived by the sword and has perished by
it.

That example which refused submission to judicial finalities
was becoming offensive to California, but the incubus of
physical fear was upon many who realized that the survival
of frontier ways into non-frontier period was a damage to the
State. But, be this as it may, the stubborn spirit that defied
the law has fallen by the law.

When Justice Field showed the highest judicial courage in
the opening incidents of the tragedy that has now closed, the
manhood of California received a distinct impetus. When the
Justice, with threats made against his life, returned to the
State unarmed, and resentful of protection against assault,
declaring that when judges must arm to defend themselves from
assault offered in reprisal of their judicial actions
society must be considered dissolved, he was rendering to our
institutions the final and highest possible service. The event
that followed, the killing of Terry in the act of striking
him the second time from behind, while he sat at table in
a crowded public dining-room, was the act of the law.
The Federal Department of Justice, by its chief, the
Attorney-General of the United States, had ordered its
officer, the United States marshal for the northern district
of California, to take such means and such measures as might
be necessary to protect the persons of the judges against
assault by Judge Terry, in carrying out the threats that
he had made. This order was from the executive arm of the
Government, and it was carried out to the letter. Judge Terry
took the law into his own hands and fell. Nothing can add to
the lesson his fate teaches. It is established now that in
California no man is above the law; that no man can affect the
even poise of justice by fear. Confiding in his own strength
as