nd their robes of office bore the damnatory evidence.
Unfortunately, too, the attorneys, the jury habit strong upon them,
brought into the superior tribunals the moral characteristics and
professional methods acquired in the lower. Instead of assisting the
judges to ascertain the truth and the law, they cheated in argument and
took liberties with fact, deceiving the court whenever they deemed it to
the interest of their cause to do so, and as willingly won by a
technicality or a trick as by the justice of their contention and their
ability in supporting it. Altogether, the entire judicial system of the
Connected States of America was inefficient, disreputable, corrupt.

The result might easily have been foreseen and doubtless was predicted by
patriots whose admonitions have not come down to us. Denied protection of
the law, neither property nor life was safe. Greed filled his coffers from
the meager hoards of Thrift, private vengeance took the place of legal
redress, mad multitudes rioted and slew with virtual immunity from
punishment or blame, and the land was red with crime.

A singular phenomenon of the time was the immunity of criminal women.
Among the Americans woman held a place unique in the history of nations.
If not actually worshiped as a deity, as some historians, among them the
great Sagab-Joffoy, have affirmed, she was at least regarded with feelings
of veneration which the modern mind has a difficulty in comprehending.
Some degree of compassion for her mental inferiority, some degree of
forbearance toward her infirmities of temper, some degree of immunity for
the offenses which these peculiarities entail--these are common to all
peoples above the grade of barbarians. In ancient America these chivalrous
sentiments found open and lawful expression only in relieving woman of the
burden of participation in political and military service; the laws gave
her no express exemption from responsibility for crime. When she murdered,
she was arrested; when arrested, brought to trial--though the origin and
meaning of those observances are not now known. Gunkux, whose researches
into the jurisprudence of antiquity enable him to speak with commanding
authority of many things, gives us here nothing better than the conjecture
that the trial of women for murder, in the nineteenth century and a part
of the twentieth, was the survival of an earlier custom of actually
convicting and punishing them, but it seems extremely improba