perform his disagreeable task with fairness
and consideration. He is permitted to entrust his defense to another
officer, whose duty it is to make a rigidly truthful and candid
presentation of his case in order to assist the court to a just
decision. The jurors, if there are jurors, are neither friendly nor
hostile, are open-minded, intelligent and conscientious. As to the
witnesses, are they not sworn to tell the truth, the whole truth (in
so far as they are permitted) and nothing but the truth? What could
be finer and better than all this?--what could more certainly assure
justice? How close the resemblance is between this ideal picture and
what actually occurs all know, or should know. The judge is commonly
an ignoramus incapable of logical thought and with little sense of the
dread and awful nature of his responsibility. The prosecuting attorney
thinks it due to his reputation to "make a record" and tries to convict
by hook or crook, even when he is himself persuaded of the defendant's
innocence. Counsel for the defense is equally unscrupulous for
acquittal, and both, having industriously coached their witnesses,
contend against each other in deceiving the court by every artifice
of which they are masters. Witnesses on both sides perjure themselves
freely and with almost perfect immunity if detected. At the close of it
all the poor weary jurors, hopelessly bewildered and dumbly resentful of
their duping, render a random or compromise verdict, or one which best
expresses their secret animosity to the lawyer they like least or their
faith in the newspapers which they have diligently and disobediently
read every night Commenting upon Rabelais' old judge who, when impeached
for an outrageous decision, pleaded his defective eye-sight which made
him miscount the spots on the dice, the most distinguished lawyer of my
acquaintance seriously assured me that if all the cases with which he
had been connected had been decided with the dice substantial justice
would have been done more frequently than it was done. If that is true,
or nearly true, and I believe it, the American's right to sneer at the
Frenchman's "judicial methods" is still an open question.

It is urged that the corrupt practices in our courts of law be uncovered
to public view, whenever that is possible, by dial impeccable censor,
the press. Exposure of rascality is very good--better, apparently
for rascals than for anybody else, for it usually suggests somethin