out honesty. The judge's predecessor eloped with a prostitute, and the one before that was a defaulter. The judge will accept a "straw bond" if urged to do so by a disreputable attorney whose large fees come from his ability to "work the court" and from no other sort of ability whatever. In other cases the judge may, for a consideration, allow a man charged with a serious offense to plead guilty to a lesser one, and to impose a nominal fine of five dollars.
Our supposititious young man sees relatively decent people who have business with the police magistrates brow-beaten, insulted, and perhaps fined without cause. When some of his wealthier comrades, or those he has watched from afar, actually have to go to jail on some serious charge, their money procures them all the luxuries of life, even to the joys of "taking in the town," an official being detailed to accompany and bring back the debauchee.
If he finally goes to jail himself, he will spend most of his time discussing with others such things as these, and will come to feel that they are the ordinary facts of social life. He may hear of small towns and rural communities in which conditions are almost as bad as those with which he is personally acquainted—places where the constables and justices work together to catch as many tramps as possible and give them as short sentences as possible in order to collect fees from the county for this, their official activity. He may hear of other places where tramps and defenseless persons are arrested on flimsy charges and then assured that "they will be let off easy" if they plead guilty, but kept in jail indefinitely if they insist on a trial—the explanation being that the justices and prosecuting attorneys get fees in proportion to the number of convictions. He may hear of still other places where the sheriff and county officers are in collusion to keep the jail as full as possible, the sheriff's contract being such that each day's board of each prisoner represents a considerable profit to him.
Now it is not likely that any one young man would have all these experiences in any one month, in any one town, but there
