The most determined efforts of the lawyers of our great cities to make a manhood suffrage constituency understand a judicial election have been complete failures. It is sometimes amusing to see the straits to which lawyers and their intelligent friends are driven to keep the judiciary from degradation. In New York, for instance, where the judges are elected for fourteen-year terms, the lawyers hit upon the plan of demanding that sitting judges whose terms expire should always be renominated by the bosses, on pain of active opposition to the entire ticket, including their proposed successors. This really involved a violation of the spirit of the constitution, for it aimed at a life tenure for judges instead of the fourteen years fixed by that instrument, to which these lawyers had sworn allegiance. It further involved the absurdity of allowing the boss to select a judge, but never to drop him, no matter what his record; and it resulted that a candidate might be opposed by the bar the first time, but if elected would certainly be supported by them the next time without in either instance any real investigation of his record, character or attainments. All this absurdity has been and is committed by intelligent lawyers in their efforts to avoid the risk of manhood suffrage popular elections of high judges. The reader can judge from this how lively the fear of popular judicial elections must be in the hearts of the lawyers of the city of New York. There is of course something repulsive in the very thought of a judge of a high court being selected in an election contest, and of his owing his place to the suffrages of a low populace. And then, there is the practical objection to an elective judiciary, that a judge’s qualities are special and such as can only be ascertained upon personal acquaintance and by men of superior attainments. The office is properly an appointive one, but with manhood suffrage in play, some of the worst selections for the bench have been made by state governors, in order to reward followers or venal newspapers. There is really no remedy and no way of taking the judiciary out of politics while either the judge himself or the appointing power is created by manhood suffrage. The trail of the serpent is over everything that comes from that quarter. As for the lower courts, the selections of their judges have been scandalous; men have been put on the bench who were ignorant of the first principles of law; drunkards, reckless politicians, ignorant, dishonest, uncouth, unmannerly specimens who have sought judicial office because they had no taste for hard work, or because their ignorance or habits were such that they were unable to earn an honest living at the bar. Some of them are notoriously owned by politicians. Senator Breen says that “After being whispered about among a coterie of closest friends it becomes well-known that this particular politician owns a certain judge and can get him to do anything.... The miserable creature