ice of the Supreme Court of the United States. The late
crusade against W. R. Hearst, which appeared to the public as a great
patriotic movement, was actually chiefly managed by a subordinate
prosecuting officer who hoped to get high office out of it.

This last aspirant failed in his enterprise largely because he had
tackled a man who was himself of superb talents as a rouser of the
proletariat, but nine times out of ten the thing succeeds. Its success
is due almost entirely to the factor that we have mentioned, to wit, to
the circumstance that the sympathy of the public is always on the side
of the prosecution. This sympathy goes so far that it is ready to
condone the most outrageous conduct in judges and prosecuting officers,
providing only they give good shows. During the late war upon
Socialists, pacifists, anti-conscriptionists and other such heretics,
judges theoretically employed to insure fair trials engaged in the most
amazing attacks upon prisoners before them, denouncing them without
hearing them, shutting out evidence on their side and making stump
speeches to the jury against them. That conduct aroused no public
indignation; on the contrary, such judges were frequently praised in the
newspapers and a good many of them were promoted to higher courts. Even
in time of peace there is no general antipathy to that sort of thing.
At least two-thirds of our judges, federal, state and municipal, colour
their decisions with the newspaper gabble of the moment; even the
Supreme Court has shown itself delicately responsive to the successive
manias of the Uplift, which is, at bottom, no more than an organized
scheme for inventing new crimes and making noisy pursuit of new
categories of criminals. Some time ago an intelligent Mexican, after
studying our courts, told us that he was surprised that, in a land
ostensibly of liberty, so few of the notorious newspaper-wooers and
blacklegs upon the bench were assassinated. It is, in fact, rather
curious. The thing happens very seldom, and then it is usually in the
South, where the motive is not altruistic but political. That is to say,
the assassin merely desires to remove one blackleg in order to make a
place for some other blackleg. He has no objection to systematized
injustice; all he desires is that it be dispensed in favour of his own
side.

VI

The mob delight in melodramatic and cruel spectacles, thus constantly
fed and fostered by the judicial arm in the United Sta