Page:Upbuilders by Lincoln Steffens.djvu/182

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he was patient to explain, and, since this was an honest opposition, he overcame it. He tells the story:

“I sent a boy to the Industrial School on the charge of ‘needing correction for his own good.’ The boy had made a clean breast of it to me, and we had such a perfect understanding, that boy and I, that he had taken his commitment papers and gone off by himself to Golden. Then appeared Counsel employed by his parents, de- claring that he had been dealt with without due process of law, no jury trial, etc., etc. He (the lawyer) said he would apply for a writ of habeas corpus. I assured him I could make no objection, but that the boy had been guilty of two or three offences constituting technical burglary, so that while he might be released for the pur- pose of obtaining due process of law, this pro- cess would not only make the boy a burglar and a thief, but would return him, so branded by the records, to the place whence he might be brought upon the habeas corpus writ.

“ The case,” says the Judge, “ was never brought.” Lawyers still lift their brows at Judge Lindsey’s “loose practice,” but though he has dealt with more than five thousand children’s cases, the ques- tion of due process has been raised but once since — at home. A Boston judge demurred not long