lessness or inefficiency of the prosecuting officer or
trial judge and not to any inadequacy in our methods of procedure.
Yet the tenth case, the case where the criminal does beat the law by a
technicality, does more harm than can easily be estimated. That is the
one case everybody knows about, the one the papers descant upon, the one
that cheers the heart of the grafter and every criminal who can afford
to pay a lawyer.

Yet the evil influence of the reversal of a conviction on appeal,
however much it is to be deprecated, is as nothing compared with a
deliberate acquittal of a guilty defendant by a reckless, sentimental,
or lawless jury. Few can appreciate as does a prosecutor the actual,
practical and immediate effect of such a spectacle upon those who
witness it.

Two men were seen to enter an empty dwelling-house in the dead of night.
The alarm was given by a watchman near by, and a young police officer,
who had been but seven months on the force, bravely entered the black
and deserted building, searched it from roof to cellar, and found the
marauders locked in one of the rooms. He called upon them to open,
received no reply, yet without hesitation and without knowing what the
consequences to himself might be, smashed in the door and apprehended
the two men. One was found with a large bundle of skeleton keys in his
pocket and several candles, while a partially consumed candle lay
upon the floor. In the police court they pleaded guilty to a charge of
burglary, and were promptly indicted by the grand jury.

At the trial they claimed to have gone into the house to sleep, said
they had found the bunch of keys on the stairs, denied having the
candles at all or that they were in a room on the top story, and
asserted that they were in the entrance hall when arrested.

The story told by the defendants was so utterly ridiculous that one of
the two could not control a grin while giving his version of it on the
witness stand. The writer, who prosecuted the case, regarded the trial
as a mere formality and hardly felt that it was necessary to sum up the
evidence at all.

Imagine his surprise when an intelligent-looking jury acquitted both the
defendants after practically no deliberation. Both had offered to plead
guilty to a slightly lower degree of crime before the case was moved for
trial.

These two defendants, who were neither insane nor degenerates, consorted
with others in Bowery hotels and saloons,--incubators of c