In theory our system is perfect. The accused is prosecuted by a public officer, who having no interest in his conviction, will serve the state without mischievous zeal and perform his disagreeable task with fairness and consideration. He is permitted to entrust his defense to another officer, whose duty it is to make a rigidly truthful and candid presentment of his case in order to assist the court to a just decision. The jurors, if there are jurors, are neither friendly nor hostile, are open-minded, intelligent and conscientious. As to the witnesses, are they not sworn to tell the truth, the whole truth (in so far as they are permitted) and nothing but the truth? What could be finer and better than all this?—what could more certainly assure justice? How close the resemblance is between this ideal picture and what actually occurs all know, or should know. The judge is frequently an ignoramus incapable of logical thought and with little sense of the dread and awful nature of his responsibility. The prosecuting attorney thinks it due to his reputation to “make a record” and tries to convict by hook or crook, even when he is himself persuaded of the defendant’s innocence. Counsel for the defense is equally unscrupulous for acquittal, and, both having industriously coached their witnesses, they contend against each other in deceiving the court by every art of which they are masters. Witnesses on both sides perjure themselves freely and with almost perfect impunity if detected. At the close of it all the poor weary jurors, hopelessly bewildered and dumbly resentful of their duping, render a random or compromise verdict, or one which best expresses their secret animosity to the lawyer they like least, or their faith in the newspapers which they have diligently and disobediently read every night. Commenting upon Rabelais’ old judge who, when impeached for an outrageous decision, pleaded his defective eyesight which made him miscount the spots on the dice, the most distinguished lawyer of my acquaintance seriously assured me that if all the cases with which he had been connected had been decided with the dice substantial justice would have been done more frequently than it was done. If that is true, or nearly true, and I believe it, the American’s right to sneer at the Frenchman’s “judicial methods” is an open question. XI