such jury-poison. A shyster lawyer need but to keep his
client off the stand and he can saturate the jury's mind with any
facts concerning the defendant's respectability and history which
his imagination is powerful enough to supply. On such occasions an
ex-convict with no relatives may become a "noble fellow, who, rather
than have his family name tainted by being connected with a criminal
trial, is willing to risk even conviction"--"a veteran of the glorious
war which knocked the shackles from the slave"--"the father of nine
children"--"a man hounded by the police." The district attorney may
shout himself hoarse, the judge may pound his gavel in righteous
indignation, the lawyer may apologize because in the zeal with which
he feels inspired for his client's cause he perhaps (which only makes
matters worse) has overstepped the mark--but some juryman may suppose
that, after all, the prisoner is a hero or nine times a father.

There is one notorious attorney who poses as a philanthropist and who
invariably promises the jury that if they acquit his client he will
personally give him employment. If he has kept half of his promises
he must by this time have several hundred clerks, gardeners, coachmen,
choremen and valets.

In like manner attorneys of this feather will deliberately state to the
jury that if the defendant had taken the stand he would have testified
thus and so; or that if certain witnesses who have not appeared (and who
perhaps in reality do not exist at all) had testified they would
have established various facts. Such lawyers should be locked up or
disbarred; courts are powerless to negative entirely their dishonesty in
individual cases.

Clever counsel, of course, habitually make use of all sorts of appeals
to sympathy and prejudice. In one case in New York in which James W.
Osborne appeared as prosecutor the defendant wore a G.A.R. button. His
lawyer managed to get a veteran on the jury. Mr. Osborne is a native of
North Carolina. The defendant's counsel, to use his own words, "worked
the war for all it was worth," and the defendant lived, bled and died
for his country and over and over again. In summing up the case, the
attorney addressed himself particularly to the veteran on the back row,
and, after referring to numerous imaginary engagements, exclaimed: "Why,
gentlemen, my client was pouring out his life blood upon the field
of battle when the ancestors of Mr. Osborne were raising their hands
against