g you might choose to make of it--a door
to illegal opportunity; a cloud of dust to be cast in the eyes of
those who might choose, and rightfully, to see; a veil to be dropped
arbitrarily between truth and its execution, justice and its judgment,
crime and punishment. Lawyers in the main were intellectual mercenaries
to be bought and sold in any cause. It amused him to hear the ethical
and emotional platitudes of lawyers, to see how readily they would
lie, steal, prevaricate, misrepresent in almost any cause and for any
purpose. Great lawyers were merely great unscrupulous subtleties,
like himself, sitting back in dark, close-woven lairs like spiders and
awaiting the approach of unwary human flies. Life was at best a dark,
inhuman, unkind, unsympathetic struggle built of cruelties and the law,
and its lawyers were the most despicable representatives of the whole
unsatisfactory mess. Still he used law as he would use any other trap or
weapon to rid him of a human ill; and as for lawyers, he picked them
up as he would any club or knife wherewith to defend himself. He had no
particular respect for any of them--not even Harper Steger, though he
liked him. They were tools to be used--knives, keys, clubs, anything
you will; but nothing more. When they were through they were paid
and dropped--put aside and forgotten. As for judges, they were merely
incompetent lawyers, at a rule, who were shelved by some fortunate turn
of chance, and who would not, in all likelihood, be as efficient as the
lawyers who pleaded before them if they were put in the same position.
He had no respect for judges--he knew too much about them. He knew how
often they were sycophants, political climbers, political hacks, tools,
time-servers, judicial door-mats lying before the financially and
politically great and powerful who used them as such. Judges were
fools, as were most other people in this dusty, shifty world. Pah! His
inscrutable eyes took them all in and gave no sign. His only safety lay,
he thought, in the magnificent subtley of his own brain, and nowhere
else. You could not convince Cowperwood of any great or inherent virtue
in this mortal scheme of things. He knew too much; he knew himself.

When the judge finally cleared away the various minor motions pending,
he ordered his clerk to call the case of the City of Philadelphia
versus Frank A. Cowperwood, which was done in a clear voice. Both Dennis
Shannon, the new district attorney, and Steger