It was all wrong. Why should he be hounded like this when the city was full of men eager to earn two dollars a day and who would not in the least mind sitting cross-legged and idle all day long in a jury box--snoozing perhaps--in order to do their duty as citizens? Moreover, there were men who actually _needed_ the money, and there were lots of them who were quite as honest as the prisoners on trial or even the witnesses who testified. He was quite sure that if he ever was sworn in as a juror, his entire sympathy would be with the prisoner at the bar, for he would have a fellow feeling for the unhappy wretch who also was there because he couldn't help it. The jury system was all wrong, claimed Sampson. For example, said he, a man is supposed to be tried by twelve of his peers. That being the case, a ruffian from the lower East Side should be tried by his moral and mental equals and not by his superiors. By the same argument, a brainy, intelligent bank or railway president, an editor, or a college professor, should not be tried by twelve incompetent though perfectly honest window-washers. Any way you looked at it, the jury system was all wrong. The more Sampson thought about it the more fully convinced was he that something ought to be done about it. He had been obliged to miss two weddings, a private-car jaunt to Aiken, one of the Harvard-Yale football matches, the docking of the _Olympic_ when she carried at least one precious passenger, the sailing of the _Cedric_ when she carried an equally precious but more exacting object of interest, a chance to meet the Princess Pat, and a lot of other things that he wouldn't have missed for anything in the world notwithstanding the fact that he couldn't remember, off hand, just what they were. Suffice it to say, this miserable business of “getting off” juries kept Sampson so occupied that he found it extremely difficult to get on with anything else. He was above trying to “fix” any one. Other men, he knew, had some one downtown who could get them off with a word to the proper person, and others were of sufficient importance politically to make it impossible for them to be in contempt of court. That's what he called “fixing things.”