The result is that we have unnecessarily fettered ourselves, have furnished a multitude of technical avenues of escape to wrong-doers, and have created a popular contempt for courts of justice, which shows itself in the sentimental and careless verdicts of juries, in a lack of public spirit, and in an indisposition to prosecute wrong-doers. In addition, the impression sought to be conveyed by the yellow press that our judiciary is corrupt and that money can buy anything--even justice--leads the jury in many cases to feel that their presence is merely a formal concession to an archaic procedure and that their oaths have no real significance. The community, the "People," have a sufficiently hard task to secure justice at any criminal trial. On the one hand is the abstract proposition that the law has been violated, on the other sits a human being, ofttimes contrite, always an object of pity. He is presumed innocent, he is to be given the benefit of every reasonable doubt. He has the right to make his own powerful appeal to the jury and to have the services of the best lawyer he can secure to sway their emotions and their sympathies. If the prosecutor resorts to eloquence he is stigmatized as "over-zealous" and as a "persecutor." If a plainly guilty defendant be acquitted, not the trampled ideal of justice, but the vision of a liberated prisoner rejoicing in his freedom hovers in the talesman's dreams. So far so good; we can afford to stand by a system which in the long run has served us fairly well. But an occasional evil, an evil which when it occurs is productive of great harm and serves to give color to the popular opinion of criminal law, begins only when the lawyers have had their opportunity for elocution. At the conclusion of the charge the defendant's attorney proceeds to put the judge through what is familiarly known as "a course of sprouts." He makes twenty or thirty "requests to charge the jury" on the most abstract propositions of law which his fertile mind can devise,--relevant or irrelevant, applicable or inapplicable to the facts,--and the judge is compelled to decide from the bench, without opportunity for reflection, questions which the attorney has labored upon, perchance, for weeks. If he guesses wrong, the lawyer "excepts" and the case may be reversed on appeal. This is not a test of the defendant's guilt or innocence, but a test of the abstract learning and quickness of the presiding judge. It is generally believed that appellate courts are prone to reverse criminal cases on purely technical grounds. Whether this belief be well founded or ill, its wide acceptance as fact is fertile in bringing the law into disrepute.* Justice to be effective must be not only sure but swift. An "iron hand" cannot always compensate for a "leaden heel".