"The body of the law--yes, damn 'em, I've bought 'em to find the body of the law myself." The Doctor sputtered along with his pipe and cried out in his high treble--"I never had any more trouble buying a court than a Senator. And lawyers have no shame about hiring themselves to crooks and notorious lawbreakers. And some lawyers hire themselves body and soul to great corporations for life and we all know that those corporations are merely evading the laws and not obeying them; and lawyers--at the very top of the profession--brazenly hire out for life to that kind of business. What if the top of the medical profession was composed of men who devoted themselves to fighting the public welfare for life! We have that kind of doctors--but we call them quacks. We don't allow 'em in our medical societies. We punish them by ostracism. But the quack lawyers who devote themselves to skinning the public--they are at the head of the bar. They are made judges. They are promoted to supreme courts. A damn nice howdy-do we're coming to when the quacks run a whole profession. And Tom Van Dorn is a quack--a hair-splitting, owl-eyed, venal quack--who doles out the bread pills of injustice, and the strychnine stimulants of injustice and the deadening laudanum of injustice, and falls back on the body of the decisions to uphold him in his quackery. Justice demands that he take that fake corporation, made solely to evade the law, and shake its guts out and tell the men who put up this job, that he'll put them all in jail for contempt of court if they try any such shenanigan in his jurisdiction again. That would be justice. This--this decision--is humbug and every one knows it. What's more--it may be murder. For men can't work on that slag dump ten hours a day without losing their lives." The captain tapped away at his sprocket. He had his own ideas about the sanctity of the courts. They were not to be overthrown so easily. The Doctor snorted: "Burn their bodies, and blear their minds, and then wail about our vicious lower classes--I'm getting to be an anarchist." He prodded his cane among the debris on the floor and then he began to twitch the loose skin of his lower face and smiled. "Thank you, Cap," he chirped. "How good and beautiful a thing it is to blow off steam in a barn to your old army friend." The Captain looked around and smiled and the Doctor asked: "What was that you were saying about Violet Hogan?" "I said I saw her to-day and she looked faded and old--she's not so much older than my Emma--eh?"