ed testimony, most of it false. So unintelligent
were these juries that a great part of the time in every trial was
consumed in keeping from them certain kinds of evidence with which they
could not be trusted; yet the lawyers were permitted to submit to them any
kind of misleading argument that they pleased and fortify it with
innuendoes without relevancy and logic without sense. Appeals to their
passions, their sympathies, their prejudices, were regarded as legitimate
influences and tolerated by the judges on the theory that each side's
offenses would about offset those of the other. In a criminal case it was
expected that the prosecutor would declare repeatedly and in the most
solemn manner his belief in the guilt of the person accused, and that the
attorney for the defense would affirm with equal gravity his conviction of
his client's innocence. How could they impress the jury with a belief
which they did not themselves venture to affirm? It is not recorded that
any lawyer ever rebelled against the iron authority of these conditions
and stood for truth and conscience. They were, indeed, the conditions of
his existence as a lawyer, a fact which they easily persuaded themselves
mitigated the baseness of their obedience to them, or justified it
altogether.

The judges, as a rule, were no better, for before they could become judges
they must have been advocates, with an advocate's fatal disabilities of
judgment. Most of them depended for their office upon the favor of the
people, which, also, was fatal to the independence, the dignity and the
impartiality to which they laid so solemn claim. In their decisions they
favored, so far as they dared, every interest, class or person powerful
enough to help or hurt them in an election. Holding their high office by
so precarious a tenure, they were under strong temptation to enrich
themselves from the serviceable purses of wealthy litigants, and in
disregard of justice to cultivate the favor of the attorneys practicing
before them, and before whom they might soon be compelled themselves to
practice.

In the higher courts of the land, where juries were unknown and appointed
judges held their seats for life, these awful conditions did not obtain,
and there Justice might have been content to dwell, and there she actually
did sometimes set her foot. Unfortunately, the great judges had the
consciences of their education. They had crept to place through the slime
of the lower courts a