"Well, I tell you, sir, janitors must be taught their place! There is no more impudent, offensive class of men in this city. This morning, sir, there was no heat in my apartment, and when my wife complained the janitor was insolent to her! Insulted her! My wife! When I went downstairs he insulted me, sir! The janitor insulted me, I say! He even threatened to strike me as you have wantonly assaulted this reputable citizen here, the complainant. It is time the public was protected from janitors. I regret that the law limits the punishment I can give you. The court sentences you, sir, to the maximum. One year and five hundred dollars!" The outburst was so sudden, so evidently a matter of petty spite, that there was a hush all over the court. "What’s the matter?" his honor snapped. "Call up the next case." Of course this sentence would have been overthrown in any higher court, but the man had no money. Such things did not happen very often, but frequently enough to keep us ever reminded of their imminent possibility. I have sixty fat note-books which record my work in the Tombs. Almost every item might be quoted here to show how little by little contempt of court grew in my mind. It crystallized not so much because of the relatively rare cases where innocent men were sent to prison, as because of the continual commonplace farce of it. Very early I learned—as the lawyers all knew—that considerations of abstract justice were foreign to the Tombs. Each judge had his foible. It was more important to know these than the law. Judges McIvor and Bell were Grand Army men. Bell was always easy on veterans. He had a stock speech—"I am sorry to see a man who has fought for his country in your distressing condition. I will be as lenient as the law allows." McIvor, if he saw a G.A.R. button on a man before him would shout, "I am pained and grieved to see a man so dishonor the old uniform," and would give him the maximum. Ryan, the most venal, the most servile machine man of the five, had a beautiful and intense love for his mother. A child of the slum, he had supported his mother since he was fourteen, had climbed up from the gutter to the bench. And filial love, like his own, outweighed any amount of moral turpitude with him. When I found a man in the Tombs who seemed to me innocent, I did not prepare a brief on this aspect of the case. I looked up his mother, and persuaded the clerk to put the case on Ryan’s calendar. If I could get the old woman rigged up in a black silk dress and a poke bonnet, if I could arrange for two old-fashioned love-locks to hang down before her ears, the trick was turned. All she had to do was to cry a little and say, "He’s been a good son to his old mother, yer honor."