favored, so far as they dared, every interest, class or person powerful
enough to help or hurt them in an election. Holding their high office by
so precarious a tenure, they were under strong temptation to enrich
themselves from the serviceable purses of wealthy litigants, and in
disregard of justice to cultivate the favor of the attorneys practicing
before them, and before whom they might soon be compelled themselves to
practice.

In the higher courts of the land, where juries were unknown and appointed
judges held their seats for life, these awful conditions did not obtain,
and there Justice might have been content to dwell, and there she actually
did sometimes set her foot. Unfortunately, the great judges had the
consciences of their education. They had crept to place through the slime
of the lower courts and their robes of office bore the damnatory evidence.
Unfortunately, too, the attorneys, the jury habit strong upon them,
brought into the superior tribunals the moral characteristics and
professional methods acquired in the lower. Instead of assisting the
judges to ascertain the truth and the law, they cheated in argument and
took liberties with fact, deceiving the court whenever they deemed it to
the interest of their cause to do so, and as willingly won by a
technicality or a trick as by the justice of their contention and their
ability in supporting it. Altogether, the entire judicial system of the
Connected States of America was inefficient, disreputable, corrupt.

The result might easily have been foreseen and doubtless was predicted by
patriots whose admonitions have not come down to us. Denied protection of
the law, neither property nor life was safe. Greed filled his coffers from
the meager hoards of Thrift, private vengeance took the place of legal
redress, mad multitudes rioted and slew with virtual immunity from
punishment or blame, and the land was red with crime.