It was my lot to defend a number of those who had committed murders, some of them murders so foul that there was nothing to say in their behalf. All one could say was in behalf of those whom one would save from committing another murder. But when you have come to know even a murderer, when day after day you have visited him in his cell, and have talked with him, and have seen him laugh and cry, and have had him tell you about his family, and that amazing complexity which he calls his life, when gradually you come to know him, no matter how undeserving he may be in the abstract, he undergoes a strange and subtle metamorphosis; slowly and gradually, without your being aware, he ceases to be a murderer, and becomes a human being, very much like all those about you. Thus, there is no such thing as a human being in the abstract; they are all thoroughly and essentially concrete. I have wandered far in these speculations, but I hope I have not wandered too far to make it clear that Jones’s point of view was always and invariably the human point of view; he knew no such thing as murderers, or even criminals, or “good” people, or “bad” people, they were all to him men and, indeed, brothers. And if society did not care about them, except in its desire to make way with them, Jones did care, and there were others who cared; the poor cared, the working people cared,--though they might themselves at times give way to the same elemental social rage,--they always endorsed Jones’s leniency whenever they had the opportunity. They had this opportunity at the polls every two years, and they never failed him. They did not fail him even in that last campaign of his, though every means known to man was tried to win them away from their peculiar allegiance. It was a strange campaign; I suppose there was never another like it in America. As I think of it there come back the recollections of those raw spring nights; we held our municipal elections in the spring in those days, that is, spring as we know it in the region of the Great Lakes. It is not so much spring as it is a final summing-up and recapitulation of winter, a coda to a monstrous meteorological concerto as doleful as the allegro lamentoso of Tschaikovsky’s “Sixth Symphony.” There is nowhere in the world, so far as I know, or care to know, such an abominable manifestation of the meanness of nature; it is meaner than the meanness of human nature, entailing a constant struggle with winds, a perpetual bending to gusts of snow that is rain, or a rain that is hail, with an east wind that blows persistently off Lake Erie for two months, with little stinging barbs of ice on its breath--and then, suddenly, it is summer without any gentle airs at all to introduce its heat.