"Well," returned the Doctor, "you know Laura works at her kindergarten
down there in South Harvey, and she got me to pass that hours-of-service
law for the smelter men at the extra session last summer. Good law!
Those men working there in the fumes shouldn't work over six hours a
day--it will kill them. I managed by trading off my hide and my chances
of Heaven to get a law through, cutting them down to eight hours in
smelter work. Denny Hogan, who works on the slag dump, is going to die
if he has to do it another year on a ten-hour shift. He's been up and
down for two years now--the Hogans live neighbors to Laura's school and
I've been watching him. Well," and here the Doctor thumped on the floor
with his cane, "this Judge--this vain, strutting peacock of a Judge,
this cat-chasing Judge that was once my son-in-law, has gone and knocked
the law galley west so far as it affects the slag dump. I've just been
reading his decision, and I'm hot--good and hot."
The Captain interrupted:
"I saw Violet Hogan and the children--dressed like princesses, walking
out to-day--past the Judge's house--showing it to them--what say? My,
how old she looks, Doctor!"
"Well--the damned villain--the infernal scoundrel--" piped the Doctor.
"I just been reading that decision. The men showed in their lawsuit that
the month before the law took effect the company, knowing the law had
been passed, went out and sold their switch and sold the slag dump, to a
fake railroad company that bought a switch engine and two or three cars,
and incorporated as a railroad, and then--the same people owning the
smelter and the railroad, they set all the men in the smelter that they
could working on the slag dump, so the men were working for the railroad
and not for the smelter company and didn't come within the eight hour
law. And now the Judge stands by that farce; he says that the men
working there under the very chimney of the smelter on the slag dump
where the fumes are worst, are not subject to the law because the law
says that men working for the smelters shall not work more than eight
hours, and these men are working for a cheating, swindling subterfuge of
a railroad. That's judge-made law. That's the kind of law that makes
anarchists. Law!" snorted the Doctor, "Law!--made by judges who have
graduated out of the employ of corporations--law!--is just what the
Judge on the bench dares to read into the statute. I tell you, Cap, if
the doctors and engineers and preachers were as subservient to greed and
big money as the lawyers are, we would soon lose our standing. But when
a lawyer commits some flagrant malpractice like that of Tom Van
Dorn's--the lawyers remind us that the courts are sacred institutions."
The Doctor's pipe was out and in filling it again, he jabbed viciously
at the bowl with his knife, and in the meantime the Captain was saying:
"Well, I suppose he found the body of the decisions leaning that way,
Doc--you know Judges are bound by the body of the law."
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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