I 



FORMS AND FAILURES OF THE LAW. 759 



committees and Judge Lynch supplant the regular courts. That is 

 the natural outcome for any locality where the lawyer, and especially 

 the able criminal lawyer, achieves his highest successes. Lynch law 

 dwarfs immensely the lawyer's importance, and while it is a dangerous 

 remedy for legal evils, it is well to remember that it is best avoided by- 

 such an administration of the law as not only gives the criminal a fair 

 chance, but in addition protects society. 



It may be charged that a general feeling of hostility to criminal 

 lawyers would make it easy for real criminals to involve the innocent 

 in trouble. This is to be considered ; but the history of judicial pro- 

 ceedings in recent years rarely shows that persons leading lives of prob- 

 ity, faithful to every duty of the good citizen, are often arraigned at 

 the bar of justice. In general, under a free government, those charged 

 with great crimes are guilty, and their swift conviction and punishment 

 are demanded by every interest of society. In other cases suspicion 

 may be due to bad habits and bad company, and when this class of 

 people are charged with crimes they have themselves mainly to blame. 

 What is wanted is swift punishment for real ti'ansgressors, and that 

 our present system of criminal jurisprudence does not bring. The 

 safeguards provided for the innocent are perverted to the use of the 

 guilty by lawyers who foolishly imagine that their own interests will 

 be promoted through the defeat of justice, forgetful that reactions 

 must come when public interests are persistently disregarded. 



A reform of great value to the State would be the education and 

 training of judges at public expense, instead of taking them, as now, 

 from among practicing lawyers. We have a National Military Acad- 

 emy and a National Naval School from which to obtain officers for 

 the army and navy, though only at long intervals and in great emer- 

 gencies is there any serious need of them ; but the administration of 

 justice, which is an every-day need, is left pretty much to chance. 

 The lower courts, those presided over by justices of the peace in the 

 rural districts, as well as the lower grade of city courts, are usually 

 held by petty local politicians, without, generally, any pretense to legal 

 knowledge except such as they obtain from certain printed forms pre- 

 scribed for them, and whenever an important case is tried by them it 

 is of course appealed. It should be said, however, that in spite of 

 many drawbacks, these petty courts — in the country at least — dispose 

 satisfactorily of a great deal of litigation without a tithe of the cost, 

 delay, and parade of the higher courts, which are invariably presided 

 over by lawyers sitting during regular terms, and where justice is 

 balked at nearly every step by the various arts — impossible for a lay- 

 man to catalogue — so familiar to lawyers, and with which the judges, 

 from their education and long and close association with lawj^ers, very 

 earnestly sympathize. If the L^nited States, or each State, had a school 

 for the education of judges in which the course of study, in addition to 

 a knowledge of the principles of law, aimed to fit the pupils to admin- 



