When we consider this in connection with the further fact that the courts continue to increase in cost--are already a veritable Old Man of the Sea about the neck of the Industrial Sinbad--can we wonder at the impatience of the people? But there is another feature which Mr. Johnson has quite overlooked in his vision of a brutal mob drunk with blood--like most lawyers, he stands too close to his subject to see more than one side, views it from beneath rather than from above. We set a higher value on human life than did our ancestors of the old dueling days. This may be called the Age of Woman--the era of her apothesis. She occupies a higher intellectual, social and political level than ever before in human history, and as she increases in importance crimes against her person assume more gravity. A generation ago such a thing as the criminal assault of a white woman by a negro was almost unknown, but now it is of every day occurrence; thus as womanhood becomes more sacred in our eyes it is subjected to fouler insult. Nor is this all: The American people are becoming every year more mercurial. The whole trend of our civilization--of our education, our business, even our religion--is to make us neurotic, excitable, impatient. In our cooler moments we enact laws expressive of mistaken mercy rather than of unflinching justice. Some of the states have even abolished capital punishment and in but one can a brute be tied up and whipped for the cowardly crime of wife-beating. We establish courts rather to acquit than to convict by disqualifying intelligence for jury service and enforcing the stupid unit rule. We provide convicts with comforts unknown to millions of honest working men and regard them as poor unfortunates to be "reformed rather than as malefactors to be punished. And when our misguided mercy has borne its legitimate fruit we take fire, curse the laws and the courts, seize and hang the offender, and have the satisfaction of knowing that there's one less monster alive in the land. Mr. Johnson suggests no remedy for what he regards as the evil of the age, and is therefore like unto the doctor who volunteers the entirely superfluous information that you "have a misery in your innards," but provides neither pill nor poultice. As Judge Lynch probably makes fewer mistakes than do the courts; as those he hangs usually deserve hemp and he renders no bill of costs to the country; and as the people are the creators and not the creatures of the courts, I am not particularly interested in his suppression, notwithstanding the fact that he seriously interferes with the material welfare of the professional juror and my lawyer friends. But were I duly ordained to perform that duty I would not begin by creating new deputies or calling out local militia companies to shoot down their neighbors and friends, to protect the miserable carcass of a rape-fiend. I would wipe out our entire penal code and frame a new one in which