worse "; or that of any one of the several classes in society, each of which has a series of formal expressions containing little or no meaning.
Thus we see there is much in forms and precedents and maxims which, if blotted from the memory of man, would leave the course of justice more clear and logical. There is much cumbersome machinery in court procedure which retards rather than assists in protecting the innocent and punishing the guilty.
It is undoubtedly true that too often in our courts, where reason and sound argument should be the only weapons, coarse expletives and physical violence have been employed, but happily the logic of brute force is gradually becoming unfashionable.
During the time when vigjilance committees were a necessity, it is a most significant fact that besides the lower class of evil-minded persons marshalled on the side of law and order were all licentious judges, stabbing jurists, duelling editors, and fighting lawyers. Make out lists of the individual members of the opposing factions and you will find with singular uniformity one composed of persons quietly disposed, honest, industrious, intelligent, and virtuous, and the other of quarrelsome, irate, waspish work-despisers. Any one who will go carefully over the first seven years of the annals of the state, as recorded by the leading writers of the time, w^ill find it almost invariably the case, that those officials prominent in shooting-scrapes, those lawyers fined most frequently for drawing deadly weapons in courts, those limbs of the law who of all others oftenest broke the law, those whom only the law was made to punish—this class was usually loudest in support of law. And why was this ? Briefly, for two reasons. First, these manipulators of the law could the more easily shelter their misdeeds under the law; and secondly, the conflict, on one side at least, had degenerated from one for principle to one politically, sectionally, and socially partisan. Some were made to govern,
